How much time you have for John Maus depends on how much time you have for bullshit masquerading as Gordon Ramsayite omniscience about the state of one’s craft. That’s not to say that John Maus is bullshit, but to be part of the Maus fandom is to have your disbelief suspended like a rubber band between the Empire State Building and the dandruff-white tips of the Himalayas. Which is to say, we’re of the well and truly converted: up here, the air is thin, the head is giddy, the view is magnificent, but at any point in this journey the support structure is liable to snap the fuck in half. Screen Memories is where we start wishing we’d brought a parachute, or hell, at least a hand to hold.
Prior to We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves in 2011, John Maus went into the proverbial cabin in the woods (his house in rural Minnesota.) After the album came out, Maus went on record saying this was probably a mistake. He had chased the myth a little too far and realised that “mixing it up with people” was actually where it was - creatively speaking - at. The epiphany was that music making was a process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, where the antithesis is offered by society at large. Maybe he went through some of that process in the press cycles following Pitiless Censors, where interviewers repeatedly told readers that Maus was insane and then jumped on him for allegedly wishing record stores would die. Apparently whatever he synthesised didn’t make isolation seem like such a mistake after all because a year later he went back to it for four goddamn years.
Anyone who’s ever considered snorting caffeine powder off a trackpad at 2am will tell you some of this was necessary: he was working on a two-hundred-something-page dissertation for the University of Hawaii. You don’t pull some of that off without quitting Twitter and the Wednesday poker game. Part of Dr. Maus’s time was also spent building a monstrous new synthesizer. Between Pitiless Censors and his own return to pitiless self-censorship, Maus (Dr. Maus) threw this penny into the wishing well: a new vocabulary for music and criticism was necessary — not the musicological critique Ted Gioia and the jazz dorks wanted, but not the feelings-y moralising of the current paradigm either. Maus seemed unhappy (although not ungrateful) with the coverage of his music, that his deliberations had been reduced to nostalgic vamping. To up the ante of his challenge, he set about making a new music out of a new instrument.
Back outta the woods.
As a title, Screen Memories doesn’t exactly backhand those who figure Maus for a backwards-gazer himself. As an album, Screen Memories isn’t backwards-gazing so much as running on the spot. Kneel, my friend — drink of the wine and be forgiven for thinking this new music sounds, uh, just like the old music. And you know, this is fine. god trash dot com, my salivating corporate publisher-kings tell me as they lick the flavour of money from their palms, is matter-of-policy strongly for the mundane, as long as it sparkles at least one shade of gold from at least one angle when we hold any given turd up to the light. But when it comes into the temple (forgive this mixed metaphor) preaching salvation, we feel a little more strongly inclined to rouse the Pharisees and kick it down the steps instead. Like, we were napping, dude.
As far as something like a theme goes, Screen Memories is actually more cohesive than any other Maus record to date. Boy, if you thought Ariel Pink’s dystopian hallucinations were Debordian hotness, dig the new slogan from ‘Pets’: “YOUR PETS ARE GONNA DIEEEEEEEE / YOUR PETS / ARE GONNA DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” The record opens with ‘The Combine’ — not ‘combine’ the verb, suggesting unification (or at least smushing one LEGO set with three others to create Space Dinosaurs from Pirate Hell) but like a combine harvester (also the etymological root of Half-Life 2’s empire of alien cops.) You could impress some pretty cute BA grads by setting Screen Memories, top to bottom, to a 45 minute supercut of CNN on any given week, atrocity after atrocity chronologised by the steady greying of the anchor’s hair. Lyrically, sonically, it’s bleak. And like sharing pro-gun control content on Facebook, its bleakness is delicious.
Let’s keep addressing the positives for a minute longer, because this review withstanding, Maus has built up a lot of goodwill. One of us will cop to having a folder of screenshots of Maus’s tweets (preserved against his impulse to delete almost anything he put onto the site) and a valid login to at least one relevant fan forum. It’s not like they read Adorno just b-because of him (b-baka) but they probably did quote him, once, to an auditorium semi-full of semi-interested spectators.
If we had to read the Maus psyche (and what’re we doing critiquing music if not writing psychotherapeutical fan fiction of the mildly famous) ‘Touchdown’ is the most apparent evidence of his fascination with the Spectacle. Imagining Maus imagining the Super Bowl as an elaborate mediating of human relationships in place of meaningful communication is not hard, especially when you hear the bloodless way he repeats “Go for the touchdown.” The way John Maus repeats this line is the way the coach of a high school football team would repeat it to his team, if that coach was one of the other dads who’d been asked to substitute despite his disinterest because the Real Coach had a wedding to go to. A more generous reading would be that he loves it for its semiotics, dancing over it somewhere between RE:Brand and David Foster Wallace’s invested overthinking of tennis. The way he throws himself at canonical phrases like “Forward drive across the line” is a chalk scratch between sincere enthusiasm and thousand-yard distance. This is an incredible distillation of what might otherwise be a lengthy analysis of the game of football.
Screen Memories is a guy standing in a nearly empty carpark yelling “Everybody knows shit’s fucked!” over a keyboard melody.
On the other hand, ‘Pets’ is an incredible distillation of what might otherwise be a lengthy analysis of the game of dying. John Maus knows that for most people, their most early, most intimate experience with death is the death of their childhood pet. By which I mean, my grandfather died when I was eight, but instead of going to the funeral, I played Resident Evil at a friend’s house. I simply did not know him well enough to care. I remember the whiteish blue colour of the tiles in the bathroom next to my friend’s brothers room, which is where the PlayStation was. I do not remember what my grandfather sounded like. I was spared a direct, meaningful encounter with mortality until the death of my childhood dog 11 years later. It wasn’t the ultimate-saddest day of my life, and it wasn’t the first sad day of my life, but it was the first saddest day of my life. The death of a childhood pet is a formative experience of a truth one will inevitably project from themselves. This truth is complicated by the fact that one won’t actually experience it for themselves, because they will be dead when it comes time for the principal experience to become a truth (dead men tell no tales; they are condemned only to live them.) One’s death is only ever experienced as a truth by the people who survive them. When John Maus insists that your pets are going to die, John Maus is insisting that you will leave an indelible mark on the people around you. John Maus is insisting that you already have. When John Maus insists that your pets are going to die, he’s really saying: “You matter.” As a degustation with a complex palette (palate) (most prominent of which is the crisp dryness of Dread complementing the citrusy zest of Reassurance) ‘Pets’ ought to earn Maus the title of The Master Chef.
(Ratatouille jokes will find no home here.)
If you believe Peter Singer, the death of a pet ought to matter as much as the death of a person. Anybody who has had a pet die and compared it to the experience of having a close friend die knows this is correct. Anyone who is young enough to have played Resident Evil on the original PlayStation and care about John Maus knows they were way too young to be playing Resident Evil.
These songs are perfect because their content is turboliteral but their context is virtually absent. The rest of the songs struggle by being too literal in their context or too abstract in their content. ‘The People Are Missing’ invokes Deleuze if Genius dot com is to be believed but does nothing with it. ‘Edge of Forever’ is seeing the immanentised eschaton in urban sprawl. ‘Find Out’ is obvious political punk that sounds three years dated (and was better realised as ‘Cop Killer’ from Pitiless Censors in any case.) As political commentary they about amount to a guy standing in a nearly empty carpark yelling “Everybody knows shit’s fucked!” over a keyboard melody.
Back into the woods.
What should this album be? For a start, every track should be 16 minutes and one second long and there should only be four tracks. Beyond that it’s hard to say. The patronising way some profiles and reviews treat John Maus is borderline infuriating (“check out our MANIC interview with ZANY John Maus about his NOSTALGIC ‘80s-SOUNDING new album!!!”) but some of the miscommunication is invariably on the artist. In interviews then and now, he talks about adoring the DIY spirit, then releases a hideous box set through Domino. He talks about the synthesizer presenting unexplored sonic potential and then releases a synth record that sounds immediately familiar. He talks about isolating himself being a mistake while making Pitiless Censors, then isolates himself for the follow-up. He talks about how “one ought to affirm in things that which they wager is worthy of affirmation” but his wagers seem unclear, or, if evident, impotent. Even while he supposes he has no talent for lyricism, bits and pieces of Screen Memories suggest he could assert lyrical ideas as dense and diverse as Ariel Pink, if only he was more assertive (as ‘Pets’ and ‘Touchdown’ show.)
I can’t help feeling like this has something to do with his return to isolation. As he says in interviews now, most of his glimpses of the world came mediated through “the news feed.” But when one goes away with their final words sounding like a promise for something new and considered, and then returns with something like Screen Memories, something has failed along the way. That something is almost certainly having a primary understanding of what’s happening in the world. And this sameness might also exhibit the truth in the speculation that algorithms are just spinning what we want to hear on loop, inoculating us against whatever’s necessary to challenge ourselves and advance. That said, there’s a plenty great record to be made coming to terms with glimpsing the world almost entirely through the news feed. Unfortunately, LCD Soundsystem already released it.
John Maus is an electrifying thinker and speaker. His conversations are dense and curious and compassionate and self-aware. If there’s a musical equivalent to Maus’s lightspeed thought train, it’s Grimes’ Art Angels (2015) — a Katamari of influences and traditions synthesised into pop songs (albeit thematically too reliant on fame.) If there’s an academic equivalent it’s surely his thesis. Screen Memories should have met that thoughtfulness in the middle, but instead it sits far apart. At the same time, it’s not disthoughtful (i.e. dumb) in a compelling way either. There’s nothing new here to be affirmed or challenged at all. Instead, finally, it is ‘80s, in a roundabout way: it’s Pleasant Dreams-era Ramones, Naked-era Talking Heads. There was life here, once.