John Maus doesn’t want you to mistake his smarts for being pretentious. Sure, the cultishly adored synth-pop performer holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy and he isn’t afraid to expound on subjects like Freud, the Enlightenment, and Michel Foucault’s Theatrum Philosophicum in interviews that often read like thesis excerpts. But he also loves cartoons, preaches his admiration for pop music in its most accessible forms, and once explained, unsatisfyingly, that he unwittingly participated in an alt-right Adult Swim program because its creators also hated TED Talks. He’s weary of coming across as the Niles Crane of avant-garde music. For his last album, 2017’s Screen Memories he built his own modular synthesizers—the act of a truly devoted audiophile—only to dismiss the exercise as a waste, later on admitting that only “about half a dozen of only the most discerning ears would make out the difference.”
Screen Memories caught Maus in an even dourer mood than usual, playing up the gloom in his deadpan voice with songs about battlefields, executions, and societal rot. It was as odd and indelible, even though it was a commonplace totem of 2017: the Trumpian despair album. It turns out that record’s apocalyptic imagery and stark mood didn’t capture the totality of Maus’ headspace at the time. Recorded during the same sessions as Screen Memories, and on those same homemade synths, its companion piece Addendum captures Maus at his most irreverent and unguarded. Artists of Maus’ intellect aren’t supposed to just fuck around—it’s assumed their work must contain layer after impenetrable layer of meaning. But as often as not on Addendum, it kinda feels like he’s just fucking around.
The bleaker the album’s subject matter, the more overt the comedy. Where Screen Memories had a song about dead pets, Addendum counters with a robotically funky one about dumpster babies (“Take that baby to the dump/To the dump!”) that plays like the imagined soundtrack to a demented Atari game. His surly baritone sounds less Ian Curtis and more the guy from Right Said Fred, and throughout Addendum he plays it for maximum absurdity. “They don’t know shit about outer space” he huffs over neon-hued keys on the opener “Outer Space,” a cross between the sensibilities of Inside Llewyn Davis’ “Please Mr. Kennedy” and Max Headroom. With its treadmill pace and chants of “Run! Run! Run!,” the manic “Running Man” seems to exist mostly so listeners can picture the dance that might accompany it onstage.
By nature of its title and packaging—the album is being pressed only as part of a career-spanning box set ahead of a digital release—Addendum risks being classified as a second-tier Maus record. Maybe that’s by design, but Maus has saved some of his best work for a rarity collection before, and leftovers or not, this material stands on its own. Only “Privacy,” a smoldering buzz-killer written by Ariel Pink, feels like a draft of a song that never quite jells into the pop spectacle it wants to be. But a pair of closing songs written back in 2003 are two of the album’s most spirited. With its feverish drum claps and revved-up synths, “1987” plays like Maus’ curmudgeonly response to the party-starting dance-punk of the early 2000s—his disdainful recitation of the word “sexy” during its breakdown ranks among his all-time great line readings. Maus has made more profound and mysterious records, but never one that has taken this much delight in its own ridiculousness.
