If the recent appetite for artists like Nicolas Jaar, Actress, and Andy Stott has anything to tell us about the taste of dance music's more studious set, it's that fitful and filthy are in, and streamlined and tidy are out. This development is neither sudden nor surprising-- the swapping of sleek sounds and tidy quantization for more distressed sonic textures and complicated time signatures has been a throughline of pretty much all electronic music for the past three or four years. But it's a difficult enviornment for someone with as crisp an aesthetic as Michael Mayer.
Mayer may be among the more celebrated of the last decade's dance personalities, but he doesn't slot quite so easily into this current landscape. That's partly because the louche, tasteful, and continental sensibilities that defined his best work don't seem like dominant ideologies in dance music anymore. Perhaps correspondingly, it also feels like his ambition and energy have waned. Over the last few years, Mayer's label Kompakt has settled into a comfortable but unremarkable groove, working roughly the same corners of the same circuit for what seem like ever-diminishing returns. Meanwhile, Mayer's solo work has been so sporadic and incremental that his Discogs page might as well be covered in moss.
Mantasy is Mayer's first original full-length in eight years. Considering such a lengthy absence, you'd be forgiven for wondering if he might come back with something dramatically different, but he doesn't take any big swings here, nor does he seem to worry much about stretching beyond his own aesthetic bounds. Detractors will argue that in 2012 his kind of touch sounds more middle-aged than craftsmanlike, and, frankly, they'll be right. In that way, I suppose Mayer is kind of a litmus test for modern dance music listeners: So long as the idea of "middle-aged" isn't total anathema to you, you'll find something to like here.
Even though it operates under the familiar laws of Mayer's universe, Mantasy's appeal largely comes from how self-contained and individual each cut is; whether it's a fidgety horror show theme ("Lamusetwa"), a moody nod to Jan Hammer ("Mantasy"), a bouquet of harp trills and birdsong ("Baumhaus"), or a skronky jazz workout ("Rudi Was a Punk"), each of these 10 tracks aims at a distinct and concrete idea. Which isn't to say that all of them hit.
As with the tepid rhythm exercise "Neue Furche" and the aforementioned "Lamusetwa", Mayer's tendency to dial things like promisingly outre sounds or rhythm sections requiring muscle toward tastefulness instead of coarseness means that he has a frustrating default tendency toward the middle of the road. On other tracks, though, such as the perfectly pitched "Rudi" or the "Billie Jean"-aping highlight "Wrong Lap", which manages the neat trick of containing some pretty nuanced sounds while also sounding huge, you're reminded of how the right amount of restraint in the right places can still lead to unexpected magic.
