![]() ![]() “In the middle of the vortex the wind picked up/Shook up the soot from the chimney pot into spiral patterns of you my love.” “I think I missed something, but I’m not sure what,” he says in a murmur that makes it seem like he’s dragging his voice across the floor reluctantly. Though the pair had split about 18 months before her passing, it’s impossible to not feel like he’s reflecting, however obliquely, on his own loss. The death of Thom Yorke’s longtime partner, Rachel Owen, in late 2016 casts a shadow over “Dawn Chorus,” the emotional center of his solo album Anima. ![]() But his actual relationship to such sources could be hard to read: Was Maus poking fun at music’s power to manufacture an emotional response, like when we find ourselves crying in the middle of a commercial, or celebrating its potential to offer us a fleeting moment of ecstasy, a glimpse of a world that is better than our own? Arriving at the end of 2011’s We Must Be the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves with the cathartic finality of perfectly curated exit music, this song-with its glittering harpsichord arpeggios, briskly pulsing bass, and grandiose allusions to borderless love-is the closest Maus has ever come to being a true believer. Enjoy.Like many of his lo-fi pop contemporaries in the early ’10s, reclusive Midwesterner John Maus pushed underground music forward by looking backward-rejecting digital studio techniques in favor of old drum machines and wonky synths, excavating the dramatic excesses of ’80s stadium pop and sentimental radio jingles as though they held clues to some hard-to-pinpoint generational subconscious. Members of Me And Him Call It Us also went to form some incredible bands, most notably Dead In The Dirt and O'Brother. Both projects are definitely worth your time, especially if you're a fan of bands such as The Sawtooth Grin, Ed Gein, or As The Sun Sets. The follow-up, Loss, takes the sound founded on their debut and widens their dynamic range, with elements of more "conventional" powerviolence, grindcore, and screamo being apparent in the mix at times. ![]() With fuel only lasting for short bouts, the album is broken up by ambient, atmospheric interludes that are more impending doom than sweet serenity. On their debut, the band unleashes explosive, charged shrieks of ear-splitting noise, alongside heavy, choking riffs with shots of sharp dissonance, all delivered in unbridled blast-beat chaos and neck-snapping syncopation. They put out two full-lengths in their initial run, with a decent amount of demos and unreleased material being shared by the band posthumously. Me And Him Call It Us were a three-piece (later four-piece) mathcore band from Atlanta, Georgia that formed in 2003 and broke up in 2007. It's incredibly comprehensive, and if you're into what I share here, you'll definitely find something to love there. On another side-note, I just want to quickly shout out this fantastic new blog, Canadian Wasteland. This may be slightly off-topic, but if you're a Bright Eyes fan, the singer of The Lazarus Plot is Laura Laurent ( Lifted. It encapsulates a plethora of viscera and a spectrum of mood, or something along those lines. I do want to emphasize that this isn't a direct comparison, as this band brought something truly special to the table, thanks in part to the dejected lyricism and raw, almost lo-fi production quality. It's a formula tried and true fans of bands as vast as Eldritch Anisette, Plunger, Endive, The Little Rock Nine, Rainer Maria, Indian Summer, or Don Martin Three should absolutely be checking this out. They often utilize clean, melancholic arpeggios, and spoken word that often build into crescendos, which can either stay clean and become sweetly sung, or occasionally burst into heavy climaxes with shredding screams. This gem of a band's output was limited, but what they did put out is absolutely incredible and severely underrated. The Lazarus Plot were a four-piece emo band from Elgin, Illinois that were active from 1997 to 1999.
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