Mouse on Mars - 'Dimensional People'

Across the last quarter-century, Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma have moved from dense noise to sleek electro-pop to carefully arranged post-rock, equally comfortable with wispy ambient tracks and banging dance tunes. While certain threads run through the German duo’s work—playful humor, an off-kilter rhythmic sensibility, an ear for colorful electronic texture—they never codified their quirks and sensibilities into a single identifiable aesthetic. There is no one sound of Mouse on Mars. For devoted fans, that’s a good thing, because you never know exactly what their next album is going to sound like. But their eclecticism has also confined them to a certain cult status. Their latest, Dimensional People, once again sounds unlike anything else they’ve made, the try-anything spirit of Mouse on Mars remains embedded in every note.

This appears at first glance to be a genre of album with a long history: DJ + All-Star Guests. From the Chemical Brothers to Daft Punk to UNKLE, electronic producers have created album-length statements by working with rappers and indie rock artists of various stripes. This sort of record has had a checkered history, yielding some great singles and its share of duds. But while contributions here from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Beirut’s Zach Condon, Spank Rock, the National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and more slot it within this shaky tradition, Dimensional People is far more coherent as a single statement than that might suggest. Mouse on Mars integrate their guests into the larger project, rather than giving them space to shine on their own. The contributors become building blocks in service of arrangement, which mostly works to the record’s advantage.

Dimensional People emerged out of a heady multimedia installation involving robots, live musicians, specialized software, and an immersive speaker setup. The essence of the project was its modular nature—by recording the base material in the same key and tempo, the various parts could be shuffled, shifted, and folded together so it would still make sense as a single piece.Those established rules shape the feel of Dimensional People in album format, as well. Instead of individual songs, it’s more of a 43-minute suite broken up by movements.

The opening rattle of a woodblock—that’s a robotic instrument “playing” it—carries through the first four tracks. It’s a twitchy pulse that undergirds the music, as horns and strings and slide guitar move in and out. In some ways, this first section calls back to another period of Mouse on Mars’ history, the post-rock of the mid and late ’90s, where familiar instruments from the rock-band set-up were being used in ways that defied genre categorization. When the vocals enter, they are, appropriately enough, those of Justin Vernon, at whose Wisconsin studio a chunk of the album was recorded. As on much of the last Bon Iver album, 22, A Million, Vernon’s voice is used as a sound rather than a vehicle for transmitting lyrics. His yelps and coos and wails are clipped and layered back upon themselves, and the words are both difficult to make out and beside the point.

Vernon’s contributions to the early passages (he also adds guitar) reflect the album at its best, when guests retain hints of their musical personality but are subsumed within the larger structure. Stemming from that are “Foul Mouth” and “Aviation,” which feature vocals from Amanda Blank and Spank Rock, respectively. These tracks are deeply weird and wonderful, mixing a profanity-laced rap, harmonized vocals that sound like the Beach Boys in a blender, and gorgeous swells of pedal steel guitar. It’s nothing you’ve heard but it’s also intensely musical, an affecting masterpiece of arranged parts.

As the album moves on, the flow becomes oblong and harder to parse. Sam Amidon brings his Appalachian folk obsessions to “Parliament of Aliens Part I,” where his vocals are mixed with a sawing violin and a swell of voices that sound as if they’re being processed through a Buchla synth. Where the old world/new world mashup of the record’s first half comes off like an effortless hybrid, the Amidon track feels like a fragment. But the handful of skippable sections aren’t really an issue on an album that moves along so briskly. In the back half, “Resumé,” featuring septuagenarian R&B eccentric Swamp Dogg, brings to mind Daft Punk’s “Giorgio by Moroder,” as the vocalist offers observations on his past over music that is constantly building and falling apart. By the time the record winds down it reveals itself to be a kind of meditation on American music, with pronounced elements of rock, jazz, folk, blues, rap, and minimalism all tied together with a Van Dyke Parks-like flair. But it arrives at this whole in a sneaky way, and it manages to avoid feeling like a concept album, or like anything else Mouse on Mars, or anyone, have done.