REVIEW: MOUSE ON MARS - WOW

Mouse on Mars - WOW
Monkeytown, 2012

Now this is more like it! I will admit to being underwhelmed by Mouse on Mars' first release of 2012, Parastrophics. What their record label describes as "a life-affirming and constantly surprising album which is crammed with ideas, exuberance and sheer kinetic energy," I found to be kind of a slog. For all the talk of songs in "compulsive new shapes, full of glitter, intrigue and addictive detail"--not to mention "an elegance . . . which speaks, whisper it, of maturity" while being "as playful as ever"--Parastrophics just isn't a fun listen for me. And if I can't have fun by (and while) listening to Mouse on Mars, what's the point of putting on music in the first place? Thankfully, WOW delivers the goods in spades (if nothing else, and there is much else, the cover of WOW is gorgeous compared to that of Parastrophics). Indeed, I sincerely doubt that I've had more fun with an album this year. Certainly this is the only album that has compelled me to laugh out loud in public while listening. It's frantic and ridiculous and conjures up images of hilarious machines run amok. Misters St. Werner and Toma even seem to realise some counterbalance was needed to Parastrophics, as the press release that accompanies the album notes "You can almost feel the tension being released" and positions WOW as a burst of creativity, "a spontaneous reaction to all those hours of studio labour" involved in the five year gestation for the followup to 2006's Varcharz.

Ostensibly a club record--and, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the track, an engagement with bass music's developments since 2006--WOW really is sheer kinetic energy, a blast of primary-coloured rubber band textures and the wobbliest, squelchiest bass possible that twitches and stumbles over itself in its headlong rush only to turn a somersault and suddenly reappear, smiling and heading in the opposite direction. That might not be enough for the kids looking for a drop, but it's awfully hard not to find the movement grin-inducing, the sense of spontaneity liberating, and the good-times vibes of it all infectious. Thus, the moments of off-kilter bump and grind on "APE" feel less out of place than joyous reminders that you have hips and should be using them, and the push-pull, stop-start groove of "VAX" proves as hypnotic a headknocker as anything coming out of the Brainfeeder camp while also sounding like half a dozen arcade machines and a full cast of cartoon characters got together for a night on the town. Indeed, the songs start to resemble a Scooby Doo-esque haunted house after awhile, with disembodied voices and cheesy sound effects coming from every direction, and the album's better for it. 

If WOW is in any way a response to bass music (or, and I do hate the phrase, Mouse on Mars' "bass music album," which sounds much too genre tourist-y), it is so only obliquely, more a reminder that the elements that in the last few years have been bolted onto dubstep's frame or smuggled into DJ sets via house or funky or what have you have always been a part of Mouse on Mars' sound. The pounding, repetitious ecstacy of "HYM," for example, is one of the better re-applications of house music I've heard, and, balanced by its aquatic wobbles, feels like a cheeky literalisation of the intersections between dubstep and house over the past few years, until the two elements combine with a loping downtempo melody line that becomes an album highlight. The mile-long and taffy-thick vocals on "CAN" might call to mind Burial's patented vocal manipulations, but he's never been this demented, never sent his listeners off into a funhouse full of helium while strobes flash the colours of the rainbow. With its glamourous surfaces, "PUN" suggests BNJMN's Black Square or SBTRKT's self-titled album, but everything is just a little too busy, too frantic, too willing to spiral out of control to be anyone other than Mouse on Mars. Similarly, if the video game bleeps and bloops of "DOG" recall something that Zomby or Joker might have released a few years ago, they're equally indebted to classic Mouse of Mars from 1995's Iaora Tahiti or 1997's Autoditacker. At this point, it's almost tempting to see Mouse on Mars as their own continuum, quite separate from the hardcore continuum (see also this), but equally likely to loop back around in new permutations and configurations.

Not everything on the album works, though. Five of its thirteen tracks are interstitial moments that link, preface, or conclude the more substantial songs. Outside of the glitchy, pretty "ESO," I find them to be mostly disposable. They do keep the momentum up, allowing the album to flow more like a mix than the collection of wildly disparate tracks that it is, but in the case of opener "SOS" and "BSD," the mood is marred by Dao Anh Khanh, a Vietnamese vocalist here singing (in much the same way that Damo Suzuki--a one time Mouse on Mars collaborator--sings during his most out there moments) in an invented language. Similarly, the closing two tracks, "WOC" and "CAT," are largely pointless, a letdown from the true closer, "SUN," which rides a hiccoughing (literally!) beat to a pretty--if twisted and disoriented--conclusion behind swooning and swooping chords and phone pad arpeggios. In the spirit of fun, though, you can't really begrudge the band a few missteps that sound like a band having a blast and letting ideas run wild.

In light of the six weeks the band spent on it and its much more obvious, lightweight content, it's tempting to view WOW as a less worthy album than Parastrophics, an album that doesn't mean as much, that doesn't really contribute to the conversation surrounding electronic music in 2012 in a significant way. This would be, in my opinion, a serious error. With its manic (and maniacal) energy, WOW feels like a catalyst to creativity, a reminder that two guys making weird, goofy techno music have managed to carve out a pretty distinctive niche for themselves over the last nineteen years. Indeed, WOW manages to contribute to the conversation precisely because of its charm--any engagement or response here feels lowkey, the result of the band hearing something they like and tweaking it to fit into what they already do, rather than grasping at relevance by making themselves over as an example of whatever style is hot (I shudder as I consider Mouse on Mars goes footwork). Without feeling the need to nudge things forward by self-consciously demonstrating their up-to-two-minutes-into-the-future cred, Mouse on Mars have managed to point out that most of the electronic music world hasn't really caught up to what they've been doing their whole career. As WOW ably demonstrates, they're waiting over here with a readymade party whenever anyone feels like joining them. 

REVIEW: LIARS - WIXIW

Liars - WIXIW
Mute, 2012

To start with--and as all reviews have had to note, especially given this video--it's pronounced "Wish You."

I feel at a loss for how exactly to review this album. It's not because I don't know how I feel about it--I really like it--and it's not because I don't have things to say about the songs (I do!). I think it's because I'm just not sure of the place in which this record exists. In many ways, WIXIW is an album that's out of time--not timeless, but not readily identifiable with any particular time period. It could have emerged in any year since the turn of the century/millennium--there's little that marks it as a record released in 2012. Though this is the most "electronic" record that Liars have released, its electronics don't gesture towards UK Bass, or Dubstep, or House, or any of the permutations therein that are currently en vogue. If anything, the electronics here point toward 1990s Warp and 1970s Berlin, more than 2010s Hyperdub, say (or even 2000s Mute). Luke Turner's review of the album for The Quietus notes the album's resemblance to Radiohead, and that's a good starting point: my first thought when listening to the album was that it resembled nothing so much as an alternative Kid A/Amnesiac. Those are two fine albums, and they mean a lot to me for various personal reasons. I imagine that I wasn't the only suburban kid with dial-up internet who followed up references to Warp Records, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Autechre in reviews of those albums and began to get an education in an alternative to "alternative rock." In 2012, though, should a band whose reputation rests on its experimental nature get credit for recreating a sound that's at least a decade out of date, regardless of how good the album is? Or, to turn the question around onto the reviewer, if a band releases an album that mines sounds not from the present and produces a record that doesn't really sound like anything else out there right now, do I have any reason to complain?

While the overtly electronic elements are something new for the band, the sounds that point back further to Bowie/Eno collaborations like Low, "Heroes", and Lodger, to the post-punk of The Fall and Joy Division, and to the motorik pulse of Neu! aren't new. Indeed, they're something of a homecoming. After the notoriously poor reception of Liars' second album (my favourite), 2004's hallucinatory witch trial nightmare They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, the band decamped to Berlin and an East German radio station for 2006's Drum's Not Dead, which channeled the percussive, repetitive elements of They Were Wrong into tense art-rock, not a million miles removed from Sonic Youth's EVOL and Sister. Following the krauty proto-punk and noise-rock of 2007's Liars and 2010's Sisterworld, WIXIW feels like both a step forward for the band away from their most traditional work and something of a retreat. In a recent interview with Ian Cohen for Pitchfork, frontman Angus Andrew stressed how much isolation and insularity is a part of the band's creative process, as "when we're in the process of writing and making a record, it's a real, actual, physical effort to block everything out." The results speak for themselves to an extent: this is undeniably a Liars record, but it doesn't feel like it's in conversation with anything outside of itself, and that is its strength and its weakness.

The opening pair of songs, "The Exact Colour of Doubt" and "Octagon," set out much of the territory that WIXIW covers. The former, a gloriously dreamy ballad that floats on glacial synths, some chattering drums straight out of a classic IDM cut, and a few strands of chiming guitar, is as unashamedly pretty as the band has let themselves be, like something from Slowdive's Pygmalion (which I'm convinced is the ur-text for Kid A, but that's a post for another day). Andrew's voice is at once tender and distant, like a lover's voice on the other end of a phone. "Octagon" is "Doubt's" more malevolent sibling, its drums skittering around a punishing kick and a swooping melody framing Andrew's slurred chants. For the rest of the album, this swing between tenderness and intensity defines the songs. First single "No. 1 Against the Rush," a reference to the San Francisco 49ers, splits the difference, suggesting the bleak beauty of Joy Division, though shorn of the kind of vocal histrionics that usually mar such efforts and augmented by a burbling percussion loop that, with its metallic tang, recalls Autoditacker-era Mouse on Mars. "A Ring On Every Finger" swings back toward "Octagon's" intensity and is WIXIW's first reminder that Liars actually started as a dance-punk band, the drums and squiggly synths working up a stiff, nervous robofunk before a strange, largely a capella close. "Ill Valley Prodigies" marries mechanical sounding percussion to a Tom Waits-ian ballad with disconcerting squeaks and squeals hovering around the edges as the first half of the album comes to a close.

The centrepiece, both literally and figuratively, is the title track. Something of a starting point for the album--guitarist/synth player Aaron Hemphill states that the process of coming up with the title, "one that was visually appealing and nonsensical . . . seemed to be good luck. And the song 'WIXIW' came out of it," helped spur the songwriting--it embodies the album's contradictory nature, and the five songs either side of it seem to be in orbit around it: at once recognizably Liars and representative of the new developments stemming from the band's experiments with electronics, "WIXIW" is reminiscent of songs and artists without really sounding like anything else. Initially, its arpeggios call to mind Portishead's "The Rip," but a little over a quarter of the way in the track turns itself inside-out and rides a weirdly droning and insistent backing through at times bizarre instrumental breaks to one of the album's biggest emotional payoffs.

After "WIXIW," the album's second half tails off a little bit, feeling slighter than the strong run of songs in the first half and containing the only real misstep. It opens promisingly with the sly, slinky "His and Mine Sensations," home to one of the record's biggest hooks in its chorus, moving the tenderness of "The Exact Colour of Doubt" into steamier territory (and never failing to call to mind Midnite Vultures for some reason).  From there, WIXIW settles into moodier, more meditative terrain. The brooding "Flood to Flood" calls back to They Were Wrong, though it never quite reaches the wonderfully deranged heights of that album (no chants of "Blood! Blood!" unfortunately), and its tension is kept at a high pitch by "Who Is the Hunter," with its creeping bass and drums and waves of synths. "Brats," though, casts another eye toward the dance floor and its energy is misplaced, breaking up the mood and lacking the nervous energy of "A Ring On Every Finger" to redeem it. The distorted vocals don't work for me--they sound too much like rap-rock knuckleheadedness--and the track serves as more of an annoyance than anything else. Thankfully, "Annual Moon Words" floats out as gorgeously as "The Exact Colour of Doubt" floated in, once again riding some wonderfully simple guitar work to the album's close, a little like "I Can See It (But I Can't Feel It)."

Like the 2012 album it most resembles (in execution if not necessarily in style)--Lotus Plaza's Spooky Action at a Distance--WIXIW offers forty five minutes (minus "Brats") of strong songwriting and interesting music. It feels churlish to complain that it doesn't revolutionize anything, that it isn't an event, no matter how much music in 2012 feels like it needs one. I like this record a great deal; at this point, were the year ending tomorrow, it would almost certainly feature in my top five albums of the year. Nevertheless, I can't help wishing that WIXIW was a little less insular, a little less disconnected from everything outside of Liars. A trendhopping record that aped electronic music's current moves without subtlety would've been a disaster, obviously, but were it able to speak beyond itself, outside of itself, this album might have been a masterpiece. It sums up in a rather neat way a certain strain of indie rock's last decade. If it could make the next step and suggest what lies beyond that sound--what happens when krautrock and Eno/Bowie and post-punk and IDM are no longer the vanguard of what rock music can be--it could be as decade-defining as those reference points were to their own times (and several after). That it isn't, as unfair as it might be to try and hold it to that standard, feels just a little like a let down, especially given how talented Liars are.