Last November, John Maus posted the words "GARY WAR IS THE FUTURE" to his Twitter. It was his second update ever, following a repost of an article from the New York Times Magazine that discussed his use of medieval modes as structural inspiration for his superficially 1980s-sounding, synth-pop power anthems. Considering the kaleidoscope of period influences that his own forward-looking pop can entail, it's hard to know exactly what Maus meant by "the future." The cover of Gary War's third LP, like Maus' comment, conjures the idea of a high-minded, rock'n'roll Robocop, ricocheting heroically across a metropolis that has been reduced to a smog-laden wasteland by the ravages of human self-interest. Designed by Robert Beatty, who has done some album covers for my own band, the record's helmeted mascot feels like a distinctly backward-looking vision of the future, mid-way between cyberpunk hero and Apollo 11 passenger.
Of course, there's always the suspicion that a more sinister breed of vigilante might be peering out at us from behind the mirror surface of that visor-- especially when you're familiar with the darkly colored, almost maniacally acrobatic compositional style that Gary War, né Greg Dalton, has been honing under the moniker since the late 1990s. A former member of Ariel Pink's live band (with John Maus) and the founder of Brooklyn's Fixed Identity records (with Taylor Richardson), Dalton didn't find a more official outlet for his home-recorded amalgam of experimental punk, synth tweakery, progressive rock, and distressed club beats until the late 2000s, when he began putting out his first 7"s, EPs, and full-lengths on labels like Sacred Bones and Captured Tracks. Like Ariel, he could be said to have an unusual knack for changing time signatures, counterintuitive melodies, and lo-fi textural play. But where Ariel's perversion of pop expectation feels celebratory and nonchalant, Gary War's has always felt a bit more manic and claustrophobic to me, as though he were trapped inside his own accidental-rich labyrinths, frantically trying to strum his way out of them.
Lyrically, Jared’s Lot probably has a lot more in common with the romantic hyperbole of John Maus, veering between absolutes of light and dark, good and evil, doomsday scenarios and the belief that love can help one find one's way out of them. On the high velocity, endlessly bleeping opener "Thousand Yard Stare", he begins an album-long negotiation between the dream of companionship and the pain of abandonment, following up some words of post-break-up hopelessness with the insight that "life's fucked, then you live a little more." Elsewhere, as on the very punk rock "Pleading for Annihilation", the existential extremes come to head with the intimation that the titular "Jared", or perhaps the Gary War character himself, would like to "[leave] this evil world behind" completely. But in keeping with the adage that when you hit rock bottom, you have nowhere to go but up, he admits in the same song that "we know it's a place where our minds can begin. In year zero, start over again."
Of course, you have to try pretty hard to make out what he is singing most of the time. Just as most representations of "the future" tend to involve some merging of man and machine, Gary War's dystopian sound-scapes involve no small variety of vocal effects, from the T-Pain-style autotune of "Thousand Yard Stare" and "Superlifer" to the pitched-down gravitas of his voice on "Advancements in Disgust" and "Pleading for Annihilation". Beyond the sensation that the album's protagonist is pulling some mind-bending, Transformers-style metamorphosis at every turn, his jam-packed arrangements seem to do the same thing. Jared's Lot showcases some of his cleanest-sounding production to date, and the richer resolution makes it all the more apparent just how many hours he must having spent layering arpeggio over arpeggio, counter-melody over melody, phaser effect over phaser effect. Tune in to "Find Our Way", one my personal favorites, and you'll hear a rhythmically uncountable bassline tarry with a synth melody that steps out of its own key more than it stays inside it. You'd probably have to sit in front of a piano to figure out how it all works, but that doesn't mean that the song doesn't settle into an undeniably catchy groove; it just defines "groove" using its own idiosyncratic parameters.
Recently, on a website I helped found, John Maus offered up a lengthy explanation of his Gary War claim that even went pretty deep into the harmonic logic (or anti-logic) of his note progressions. The point he seemed to be trying to make, overall, was that Gary War makes pop music that all but completely undermines the rules of pop itself. Of course, as Maus himself allows, you probably don't have to be fluent in "'lead sheet' vocabulary" to come away with that conclusion, or to appreciate the fact that there is way too much going on inside this album than you can digest in a single sitting. If you can get past the need for Gary War's melodies to resolve in the way that you expect them to, and allow your ear to follow whatever warped texture or crazy synth modulation it feels most attracted to at any given moment, this masterfully constructed album can be as fun to navigate (and as deeply psychedelic) as a Choose Your Own Adventure tale.
