Slant Magazine

I'm sorry, but is this serious? I can understand that John Maus is not for everyone, but zero stars seems excessive (no, it doesn't seem, it is.)

You even say that Believer is a "decent" song, how can you give it zero stars in that case?

The music isn't even that weird, the structures are fairly straight forward pop structures, some synths, and some slightly odd vocals. I see very little pretension in John Maus, especially when compared to a much of independent, underground music.

I'd respond more, but only about a paragraph of this review talks about the actual music, the rest is filler and some low-blows about his political philosophy work (who cares what his political philosophy is like? how is that relevant at all?)

I actually had to sign up to this website because I felt it absolutely necessary to point out that this may be one of the poorest reviews I have ever read—and I've read a lot of the NME. Apart from the fact that you obviously had to resort to a dissection of Maus' academic work (which btw is completely unrelated & uninteresting in the context of this review) in order to fill up space (I can only assume it was a word count issue, see also the extended paragraph about John Maus from the Walker Bros) but you seem, like so many music writers now, to think that an album review is an opportunity for the public to find out about you (both you & the artist in question went to Uni of Hawaii...Wow, that's so...irrelevant). It doesn't even matter what I think about the album (amusingly enough, I'm actually reviewing it currently as well) or the artist. This is just shoddy.

Finally! a good review of a mediocre album. It's funny seeing soothla and woogin complaining about the attention put to his academic background (and truths about them) because every review praising the album I've read, usually revolves around John Maus's P.H.D in political sciences. Ah, well you can't go against the current like salmons do and express yourself without having everyone up your back for doing so.

I find nothing cutting edge, trascendental, experimental or even artsy in this music. I just hear decadent retro kitsch. I mean, we've come a long way since the hipster trends of the early 2000's, but this? Decadent.

"...at worst, like a Human League track played backward in a Walkman taped to the skull of a drowning man"

That made me laugh. Even though, I feel that you heard some other album.

@thiefofire—Mediocre albums don't get "0" stars. The hatred which comes across in this review sounds almost personal. Maybe, it was a big mistake going hunting for the artists' political musings. Could the reaction towards them created a mental block towards the music? The vocations might be the same but Maus has created an album which is being admired by a lot of people. Look what the author spat out!

It's quite funny to see a review this personal & have the writer defend it because he likes to write 'entertaining' pieces. The point of a review about a specific product is to talk about the product it's self, it's quite clear you hold a level of bias towards John Maus so you shouldn't of done this review, this review stinks of personal agenda and all I have to say to you is get a blog because you seem to have confused yourself with an actual critic.

I don't know this artist, but I do know that many artists make work that is intensely personal and deliberately wear everything on their sleeves. That can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be intolerable when the artist has questionable or difficult (to put it nicely) personality traits. If what they create screams "douchebag," and further evidence backs this up, then it's the honest critic's job to call them out on it. Of course, dbags can make great art, too. "Anyone can cook."

Factual error: Maus doesn't study at the University of Hawaii, he *teaches* there. He studied (philosophy) at the European Graduate School, somewhere I imagine the author of this ridiculous review wouldn't even be qualified to be janitor, despite (or rather due to) his pompous attempt to demonstrate his 'heavy-hitting' credentials by falsely claiming academic equivalence with Maus and his subsequent casual dismissal of Maus's philosophical writing backed up by nothing but a hand-wave. Maybe instead of trying to be entertaining he should try to put forth an actual argument.

No, he's a graduate student according to the university website. (Graduate students teach.) The European Graduate School, meanwhile, is at worst a scam and at best an informal gathering very unlike a conventional MA program (students don't get to work directly with the famous "faculty," they just get to hear them lecture). Good PhD programs aren't likely to consider it better than taking a few years off. In any case, though I don't have strong feelings either way about the album, I agree with the author in principle. Bringing this sort of thing up in a negative music review is completely fair, to my mind, and it crops up all the time in positive reviews. If you want to get a quick assessment of "the product itself," read record distributors' new release lists. Reviews are a different game.

The world is ready for Maus' music, it has heart and a breadth of vision that comes from a completely new and entirely refreshing place. It has thinking, technique and imagination. It opens up an entirely new field and I am in love with it.

Slant get a new music critic. This one is stale.

Just because I am still kinda peeved by how inane and unfair this review is... by way of a forum for some of Maus' thinking which the reviewer above describes as a "parody of post-structuralist social theory". I wanted to set out a quote from an interview with Maus I really liked-

"I agree with the idea that we should work to give ourselves, and try to be as certain as we can, even perhaps to a pitiless degree, so that we're truly giving something else than what already was. Because what already is, babies on fire and shit like that, whole continents dying of disease and everything that we all know, when we all know it's bad. So maybe if we want something different from that it's something we need to struggle pitilessly for, as opposed to consuming, communicating, and enjoying."

This is miles away from a pretentious, fatuous idiot quoting Derrida (God knows there are many of those kinds of people and they very much are worth getting stuck into). This is direct, serious thinking about humanity and the effort and meaning of art in a way people aren't really doing right now and it is actually really important. So don't be put off by this idiot review and go and check Maus out.

the Duff corporation wholeheartedly supports the this album.

+1 on bandwagon (above)

I won't attack this reviewer for his review. He is entitled to his opinion. Here is mine.

John Maus is not exactly exploring new territory on this LP but then again, if you enjoy his music, then this should not pose too much of a problem, or any at all. His production is still dense and lo fi. His lyrics are still as existentially bleak and occasionally darkly humorous as always. And some songs transcend the genre he is working within and distill a graceful beauty that borders on heartbreaking. His music is, for some of us at least, never less than engaging and interesting. I believe this album is much stronger than his last album, and on par with his first. It is fairly clear that Maus is not for everyone, based on my own experiences playing it in my car for unsuspecting listeners. For those of us that hear and understand, we are grateful for his contribution.