John Maus - Fairy Tales of the Apocalypse

I was a musical thrills junkie

Between 2017 and 2018, John Maus broke a long silence to give us two great records: Screen Memories and Addendum. As well as confirming his talent, this double release catapulted us back into a dark, retro avant-pop world, full of stories, obsessions and unique scenarios.

Even before getting to know his music, the man himself immediately grabs your attention: genius and madness, passion and anarchy. Born in 1980 in Austin, Minnesota: a kid like any other, raised on MTV at full volume, especially when it played “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. With a punk attitude he picks up a bass and falls in love with Syd Barrett. Maybe music can give him a different life outside Austin. His first steps are pure lo-fi: multitrack recordings with the odd vintage synth thrown in. They would see the light around the turn of the new millennium on four EPs: Snowless Winters, Love Letters From Hell, Second Album and I Want To Live.

Meanwhile Maus studies Music Composition at the California Institute of the Arts, forging the conceptual foundations of his future discography: the Middle Ages, a devotion to Baroque music and the experimental work of Pisaro, Feldman and Cage. There's one unplanned variable: a classmate by the name of Ariel Pink, who introduces him to pop, creating a backdrop that's explosive to say the least. The two become close friends in no time and share projects (Maus joins the Haunted Graffiti band and releases a single with Pink under the name Holy Shit), collaborations (the track “Loverboy”), joys (touring together with Panda Bear) and sorrows (labels refusing to release Maus's material).

2006-2007: Love Letters From Hell

The sorrows end in 2006. On Songs, Maus collects and remasters almost all the tracks from his EPs into a proper album, released by the British label Upset the Rhythm. Once past the deceptive opening organ, a question arises: can you dance to cosmic pessimism? The answer is yes: with “Time To Die.” Framed within the canons of synth-wave, Maus manages to be unique and instantly recognizable: thanks to a processed voice that seems to come from another galaxy, lyrics steeped in study and obsession, touches of vintage synthesizer and pulsing bass hits. Bizarre to the point of outright strange, yet compelling: the songs often open with repeated “catchphrases” backed by frantic drum machines, with which John drags the listener into his own universe. “Don't Be A Body” is a nonsensical little march that could be played for the Beatles' drummer (“Sex with car/ Sex on top of car/ Sex inside of car/ Sex with movie star/ Sex with Ringo Starr”), while “Real Bad Job” is the soundtrack to a video game in which our hero is torn between the desire to fully live out his artistic path and the many troubles of everyday life.

Along with the pointless lo-fi of “That Night,” the lowest points are—absurdly—the ones where Ariel Pink shows up: “Forever And Ever And Ever” and “Blowing In The Mind.” Luckily “Maniac,” with its “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah/ I'm such a maniac,” lifts us out of the slump. The defiant slogans of “Less Talk More Action” and the dark, poetic glimpses of “The Peace That Earth Cannot Give” enliven the second half of “Songs.” The shape of an undefined but close companion emerges: “Trough The Sky For You” and “Of North of North Stars” paint a frozen, lifeless world where the absence of a woman's breath makes everything more merciless: the depths of depression expressed on Songs.

And if there's no peace on Earth, imagine Heaven: “And Heaven Turned to Her Weeping” is the slow, solemn closer in which Maus, despite the pain (“The flowers are dying now that you’ve left me/ There’s no one to hold anymore/ The city is haunted and nobody loves me”), hints at a glimmer of consolation: “Even when you're far away from me/ You're in my dreams.”

From someone like John Maus we don't expect a collection of Valentine's Day songs and sugary dedications. The opening of Love Is Real suggests a break from its predecessor's anguish: if before Paradise was weeping, now it's simply real, and it invites us to stop running: "Don't have to run anymore/ You don't have have to run anymore from love". "Do Your Best" – one of the most beautiful and magnetic songs Maus has ever conceived – shows us a solitary figure in the city: nothing new there, but his mission – consoling another lonely soul – reveals an "activism" that wasn't there before.

The slogans are concrete and direct, see "Rights For Gays", yet "normality" is already over... here comes Hell. "Love Letters From Hell", "Don't Worship The Devil" (complete with its own "No!") and "Tenebrae": gripping passages, crazy and fun.

The slow, hypnotic "The Silent Chorus" precedes the military double-header made up of the instrumental "Navy Seals" and "Pure Rockets". What's that? Did you miss dear tragic Maus? Don't worry, with "My Whole World's Coming Apart" everything "falls back into place", considering that the screams in "Too Much Money" are the most disturbing thing the American has ever recorded, while "Old Town" and "Time Is Weird" bring us back among old, melancholy structures.

Songs and Love Is Real, though lacking the peaks of his mature phase, are two solid works in which the author lays his cards on the table with real personality. Unfortunately they fail to win over critics and audiences alike, but they immediately mark Maus out as a cult artist, an outsider beyond trends and fashions, and one of the champions of hypnagogic pop.

2011-2012: We Can Breakthrough

There's more to Maus's life than music. He studies and teaches political philosophy in Hawaii, then in Switzerland. Every so often he takes a break, holing himself up in a room back in his native Minnesota. He doesn't write songs: he prefers to dedicate himself to chemistry experiments, occasionally risking blowing himself up. An explosion does eventually happen... but it's in the world of the seven notes.

In 2011 came We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves, a quote from a line by the French philosophy professor Alain Badiou. The material is the same, even better produced, but still with that mock-naive air, a bit naif, that helps keep it out of the encyclopedias of disposable music. Extraordinary are the barely three minutes of "Quantum Leap", with its mock-epic keyboard intro and a bass-and-drums pairing straight out of second-era Cure, all topped off with cavernous vocals. A perfect little model of the good old days. Even better to discover that when the song fades out, it abruptly gives way to the dreamy air of "... And The Rain", which becomes almost sepulchral, yet still respectful of certain pop conventions, as it describes a rain that keeps falling relentlessly. And Maus remains astonishingly balanced, even as he keeps risking slipping into the nearest puddle. He won't aim for originality, but he's a decent tightrope walker. Even when he apes the romanticism of the late Black in "Hey Moon", riding a simple piano arpeggio, with hissing little keyboards, and splitting the chorus with a sweet girl (the singer-songwriter Molly Nilsson); a lovely song, honest and fitting for those late afternoons when it's time to go out and pick the grapes.

And Maus is also capable of granting a few hidden wishes: how would Ian Curtis have behaved inside New Order? "Head For A Country" is your answer. The stubbornness of "Matter Of Fact" and the Ultravox-like poses of "The Crucifix" are two more good reasons to confirm the impression that Maus knows how to write perfect synth-pop crib notes, capable of reviving old glories, drawing a tear from older listeners not yet afflicted by cynicism, and perhaps pushing some kid to go rummaging through an older friend's attic.

Buoyed by the album's critical and commercial success, Maus released the following year the outtakes collection A Collection Of Rarities And Previously Unreleased Material. It's not a clumsy attempt to strike while the iron's hot, but rather the opening of a drawer of memories to pull out further gems of real value that help complete the picture of the man. The icy opening of "North Star" and the brisk "All Aboard" immediately rank among his signature tracks, condensed packets of LED-lit sensuality and solemn, austere vocal lines reminiscent of Gregorian chant. But good old Maus is keen to remind us that, despite his academic background, his ultimate goal is always to be "as much poppy as I can", as he's often stated. However terse and oblique his idea of pop may turn out to be: the extremely brief "The Law" and "Bennington" hit the mark dead-on, stirring emotion and communicating as lightly as ever.

"Angel Of The Night" and "Rock The Bone" are among the album's other highlights, particles that echo romantic and consoling amid the abandon of the metropolitan night, while "The Fear" and "Fish With Broken Dreams" are his personal take on that muffled anguish that belonged to the generation of Ian Curtis, Andrew Eldritch and Robert Smith, but which is still very much alive in the streets and desolate minds of the 2000s. Emotional and charged with urgency, with this collection Maus definitively cements his formula, perhaps not an innovative one, but full of vitality and impact. Anyone still unaware of him is missing out on one of the most sincere and exciting revivalist experiences of recent years.

2017-2018: I Want To Live

After the 2011 and 2012 records, our man enjoys the fruits of his harvest: for everyone he's a master of avant-garde pop, and his fanbase grows ever more devoted, as the Maus Space website shows. But that doesn't change the way he works. Maus takes six years to release his fourth album. Six years in which he studies, writes, builds modular synthesizers, earns his PhD in political philosophy, and records Screen Memories at home alone, in the quiet of Minnesota.

The gothic-pop of "Teenage Witch" alternates with the industrial-funk of "Touchdown", the darkwave of "Find Out" and the dream-pop of "Decide Decide". Closing things out is "Bombs Away", a track made years earlier with Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck under the name Holy Shit.

Maus winks at those "screen memories" that take us back to the sci-fi of the Seventies and Eighties, including that of John Carpenter, the audiovisual artist recently returned to live performance, who must also have inspired Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon for the soundtrack of the cult TV series "Stranger Things".

But the poetics underlying this record don't simply amount to collecting and reproducing the stylistic tics of those years purely to push the buttons of vintage nostalgia: Maus builds a time machine in which he inserts pop phrasings and minimalist structures like algorithms, to create an anti-product, through a working process utterly at odds with that of contemporary pop productions with their (so appetizing) retro flavour (of lost time). Screen Memories is made up of fully realized songs and catchy melodies that stick in your head and demand to be shared live. It's an intriguing, enjoyable album with a dark electronic energy that captures body and mind alike.

If the image one might have of Maus is that of a somewhat nerdy professor, the live version will shock you: his shows (first in the form of live karaoke, just him and an iPad with the backing tracks, then with a band in tow) are convulsive, hysterical, unhinged performances. Seeing is believing!

Addendum: an addition to Screen Memories. Born of the same inspired sessions as its predecessor, the record was initially conceived as an extra in the retrospective anthology released in April 2018, which promptly sold out: a solution that didn't do it justice, so much so that it was given its own independent release the following month. A thoroughly justified choice, since Addendum is by no means the "little brother" or outtakes collection of Screen Memories, nor an "A Collection of Rarities and Previously Unreleased Material Part II": it's a record with a clear identity and some very interesting distinguishing traits. Screen Memories is a retro-synth sequence of dark, often gothic-leaning scenarios: missing persons, puppies destined for a wretched end, and ghosts hovering over battlefields; all wrapped in philosophical notions and lofty concepts that made Maus the definitive voice of apocalyptic avant-pop. On Addendum, however, death and unsettling imagery give way to contexts that remain cryptic but are more irreverent, even opening up to decipherable biographical glimpses. The "Bizarro Section" is duly represented by baby dumpsters ("Dumpster Baby") and bursts of "Sexy, Sexy, Sexy, 1987, 1987, 1987, AK-47". And if your legitimate curiosity is pushing you to find out more about this fascinating, mysterious outsider, here are a few interesting pointers: "Other Space" announces the arrival of "Mr. Money Bags, Mr. Brand New Shoes, Mr. I Am A God" along with some cornerstones of his poetics, such as the Middle Ages (later the absolute protagonist of the track "Middle Ages") and the Universe. Very telling is "Privacy", about his reserved, solitary nature:

Happy alone

No one i know

Or think that they know

What I’m all about

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and the latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google