Parastrophics

You don't expect bands like Mouse on Mars to be around for two decades. When Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma debuted under that name in 1994 with Vulvaland, a pillowy-soft album that found threads between UK post-rock and ambient house, other artists on their label included Th' Faith Healers, Moonshake, Seely, and Laika, bands that would be pretty much done by the turn of the millennium. But Mouse on Mars endured and, though they never "broke through" in any real sense, they've managed to remain part of the conversation. They stayed relevant by adapting and changing, applying their mastery of music-making technology (which was changing rapidly in those early years) to a distinct sense of structure. Mouse on Mars albums such as Autoditacker and Glam sounded futuristic in their own way, but their charms had less to do with the way they pushed the limits of sound design and more to do with how you tended to remember things like chord changes, melodies, rhythms.

The band's sense of experimentation ramped up in the 2000s, as they tried their hand at straight electro-pop (Radical Connector), collaborated with Mark E. Smith of the Fall as Von Südenfed, and made excursions into dense, abrasive sound that bordered on noise music (Varcharz). After that, they went away for a while, working on side projects (Jan St. Werner with his Lithops alias, Andi Toma doing studio collaborations with bands including Junior Boys) and now they return with their best record since 2001's hyper-eclectic Idiology. While that release found them dabbling in mutant ska, blown-out noise, and lush acoustic instrumentals, Parastrophics is diverse within narrower parameters. This is very much an electronic album, though it covers a tremendous amount of ground in that broad terrain.

What's most striking about Parastrophics is how, despite sounding very much like Mouse on Mars and in some ways coming over as a throwback to the dense, colorful style they were perfecting between 1997 to 1999, it sounds very much in tune with the maximalist electronics of the moment. Since their comparatively muted first two albums, St. Werner and Toma have not been known for restraint; if there's an open part of the sonic spectrum, they're going to fill it. But while current artists like Rustie and Flying Lotus foreground technology, packing their tracks full in a way that makes you think of a bent and shaped data stream, Mouse on Mars have a weird knack for putting the technology of the music in the background. The songs here are music first and sound excursions second. And they manage to string a staggering number of tightly packed nuggets of melody and texture into 46 minutes.

Parastrophics flows like a suite, with very few pauses and chances to catch your breath. Everything is constantly in motion. One moment there are string-like stabs that sound pulled out of the score from the factory scene in Modern Times, another there's a swooning slide guitar that brings to mind a plasticized version of Hawaiian tiki; there are bass drops and "Numbers"-like synth pulses and voices that are looped and even sort of rap. The lines between tracks, instruments, and genres are continually blurred, but it never feels incoherent.

The defining aspect of that sensibility is something that is very rare indeed in the world of electronic music: Mouse on Mars are funny. It's hard to talk about instrumental music in terms of humor, but Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma make music that is playful and sometimes even silly. Part of it is their sound palette, which tends to favor cartoony bleeps and squelches and toots, and part of it is their feel for rhythm, which always injects a charming bit of awkwardness into the beats. So while the playful spatter-house of "Polaroyced" can get heavy, and the bouncy electro of "They Know Your Name" has a tough low end, these tracks are also shot through with goofiness, a sort of exaggerated top-heavy strut.

But if the textures and beats are winking and mischievous, the overall sense of musical structure is dead serious and, ultimately, virtuosic. The songs grow, change, build, and resolve, and never stay in one place for long. They are surprising, filled with non sequiturs that tend to accrue logic with repeated listens. They can be strange, crawling, drone-ridden things with pinched, heavily processed vocals, such as "Syncropticians", or they stream-roll with a rapid-fire rap and industrial grind that bring to mind Mu's "Lets Get Sick". The peculiar genius of Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma is that they make all these things sound like they could come from no one else. The fact that they are still doing it 18 years after their first album, and still capable of making some of the best music of their career, is inspiring.