There aren’t many electronic dance musicians more cantankerous than deadmau5. His beefs are legion, his tweetstorms legendary. And the scrawny, tattooed Torontonian’s self-loathing is nearly as famous as his short fuse. Sometimes, the self-deprecating potshots—making fun of his own costume, admitting that most EDM performances are pure pantomime—scan as refreshingly down-to-earth takes on an industry full of metastasized egos and virtually no self-awareness. But sometimes, his snark takes a darker tone. Just a year ago, he threatened that he was thinking about “killing off” the deadmau5 “bullshit” and starting over. “fuck it. why not,” he tweeted, sounding not unlike a man standing on the railing of a bridge.
But where many neurotic artists’ work actively benefits from their neuroses, the same can’t necessarily be said of deadmau5, aka Joel Zimmerman. His music isn’t without its strengths: It can be catchy and immersive, and it’s remarkably well-engineered, packed with satisfying oomph and spine-tingling timbres. And for all the shit that deadmau5 has gotten for being, well, deadmau5, his music has often been markedly less corny than 99% of mainstream EDM. The best deadmau5 tracks burrow into the kind of long, dark groove that has characterized four-to-the-floor dance music since the very beginning; for listeners, they’re more about losing yourself in the beat than gawking at the bozo onstage. (That’s ironic, given his mouse-head gimmick.) Nevertheless, his music tends to be relatively uncomplicated, conflict- and friction-free—in short, far more polite that you’d expect from a guy who smokes like a chimney, swears like a sailor, and, you know, wears a gigantic, light-up cartoon mouse head on stage.
Perhaps it’s this disconnect between his music and his persona that led deadmau5 to trash his latest album upon its release. “i don’t even like it,” he tweeted. “it was like... so fucking rushed / slapped together.” Later, despite “orders from above” not to bad-mouth his own work, he explained to Rolling Stone that it wasn’t written “from start to finish; it’s over a year’s worth of work that doesn’t correlate. It's not *The *fucking Wall!” (Remarkably, this isn’t the first time he’s criticized one of his own records in almost identical language. Of 2012’s >album title goes here<, he lamented the fact that his “tour-heavy year” had stood in the way of him sitting down and making something “from start to finish like The Wall.”)
Still, the album isn’t without its pleasures. The opening “4ware” is wistful and driving, with a pinging lead reminiscent of Eric Prydz or Gui Boratto’s progressive trance. The nu-disco number “Cat Thruster” manages the perfect balance of slouching cool and giddy kitsch, playing legato synth riffs and ersatz electric bass off harp flourishes and clever chord changes; if someone told you it was a new Todd Terje tune, you probably wouldn’t bat an eye. And the grinding “Deus Ex Machina” sounds a lot like the kind of gravelly, psychedelic techno that Robag Wruhme and the Wighnomy Brothers used to be known for.
Some songs are more lackluster. Both “2448” and “No Problem” tear pages from the Daft Punk playbook, but the former wastes a perfectly good synth riff on a formulaic big-room stomp whose slow rise in pitch mimics a trick he already tried on 2010’s “Bad Selection,” while the heavy-handed touch of the latter tune makes Justice’s most lunkheaded jams look like surgical implements. And the unrequited-love song “Let Go” aims for bittersweet release, but it gets hung up on the earnest-yet-anodyne vocals of the young singer and producer Grabbitz.
Even on some of the stronger tracks, Zimmerman seems to be going through the motions. His synthesizers have never sounded richer, but once introduced, his sounds don’t morph and his themes don’t evolve; loops simply loop, unvarying and uninflected, and once a track gets through its obligatory mid-way breakdown, there's really no point in sticking around for three or four minutes of reprise. His drums, meanwhile, favor cleanliness over character; the disco-leaning “Cat Thruster” has more to do with abstract ideas of disco than the music’s actual essence.
What’s most frustrating is that Zimmerman clearly has it in him to make a better, more exciting record. “Glish,” a three-way merger between IDM, digi-dub, and skweee, could pass for Aphex Twin, and “Snowcone” is a perfectly serviceable Boards of Canada tribute—not a goal in and of itself, necessarily, but at least a stepping stone toward greener pastures. Best of all is “Whelk Then,” which mixes thundering breakbeats and glistening synths until they swirl like the interior of a snowglobe. Finally, here on the album’s penultimate cut—it would have made for a killer close if they hadn't tacked on an unnecessary, 12-minute edit of “Let Go”—we’re given a sense of what one suspects Zimmerman really wants to do. So why isn’t he doing it? What's strange about W:/2016ALBUM/ is that it’s Zimmerman's first album since buying himself out of his contract with EMI; in theory, that means he should finally be beholden to no one but himself. Yet he still sounds like he’s hemmed in by others’ expectations of what deadmau5 is supposed to deliver, and who deadmau5 is supposed to be. Maybe it really is time for him to build a better mousetrap once and for all, and see what happens next.
