Idiology (Reissue)

Muzik - 5 out of 5 - "...They have rarely sounded more enthused about their own unique creations....MoM are probably the only group ever to mix deconstruction with dance and still sound fun..." Magnet - "...Tunes painstakingly assembled from densely packed sound-snippets....They have a scholarly grasp of the last quarter-century's dance beats, but the professors like to wear party hats..." Spin - 7 out of 10 - "...The group splinters NIUN's hyperactive passivity into either spazzcore blast or tranquilized avant pop..." CMJ - "...Like a dreamed trip through a kaleidoscopic circus...[there] is dark techno...cinematic fairy-tale wonder...and philosophic meditation..." NME - 7 out of 10 - "...Conformity os the enemy....a post-everything record - it's the sound of music being carefully shredded in the hope of finding something new and better..." Mojo - "...Sounds like the kind of upliftingly cracked Euro techno we'd be listening to if Tristan Tzara's Dadaist revolution had successfully kicked off....liekbeing trapped inside of a damaged mechanical brain. Yes, it's that good." Alternative Press - 7 out of 10 - "...An inspired collection if irreverent hackery and emotional depth..."

While their peers in the field of electronic music continued to either overshoot experimentally (resulting in radical, unlistenable work) or make the same records over and over again, German duo Mouse on Mars pumped out radical, intriguing work by the bucketful. Idiology, the duo's seventh full LP in as many years, is a more immediate album than its predecessor (Niun Niggung), not quite as reliant on the hyperprogramming and content to simply chug along with crunchy beats and the usual roster of push-the-envelope effects. The opener (and single), "Actionist Respoke," sets the agenda immediately, with a red-line vocal sample shimmying its way through a crunchy breakbeat production. It's probably the most traditional track on the album though, as the pair throws away the Mouse on Mars rule book for much of the rest of Idiology. "Subsequence" works its way around a dabbling piano line soon taken up by clarinet and strings as well, with all manner of effects/samples chirping away in the background. Tracks three and four comprise ten minutes of practically beatless, chaotic bliss, introduced by a fetchingly overenunciated vocal from drummer Dodo Nkishi. The next, "Catching Butterflies With Hands," lurches along like an obviously dysfunctional toy from some Disney cartoon, struggling to perform its duties and, in an odd way no one could've expected, succeeding. Hidden within Idiology are at least half-a-dozen mini-masterpieces of neo-electronic composition, and as many tracks of flat-out electro-funk. Most significant of all when considering Mouse on Mars is that, in the notoriously coattails-riding electronic scene, no one's been able to duplicate what Mouse on Mars does so often, so consistently, and so well. ~ John Bush|