Mouse on Mars

Varcharz

(Ipecac)

Record Review by Kate Guillemette

German mostly-duo Mouse on Mars have been programming and reprogramming electronic music at various levels of experimentation for a good thirteen years now, and their newest release, Varcharz, tells the tale of a bewildering variety of machinery at work chewing up, spitting out, and shuttling further along the Mouse on Mars assembly line thorny little packages of grimy metal bits salvaged from cumbersome PC parts, a kitchen appliance store, and/or great, squeaking, crusty guitars.

“Skik,” “hi fienilin,” and the friendly “one day, not today” surely have video game consoles somewhere in their optimistically sputtering hearts, and “Bertney,” the most gently noble of these tracks, could be a quirky anthem for an aging anthropomorphic factory whose workers have all been downsized, but can’t quite stop going through the motions.  On the darker side, the IDM dance floor gets swarmed by heavy metal and the military-industrial complex on half-limping, half-rocking bangers like “düül” and “inocular.”  There are two additional tracks past the officially titled nine; one is a demented threshing machine, and the other is more like a gentler puttering tractor.

All of the above shift unselfconsciously, unpretentiously, and unmercifully from one mode to another, both between tracks and on each individual track.  Be ready to chip your teeth dancing to this gritty unruly cyborg of an album.