Momus - Hypnoprism

The fact that I only discovered yesterday that Momus, once one of the top figures in my list of musical heroes, had put out a new album last year. Hypnoprism isn't a bad record--it's certainly better than his last, JoeMus--but it has me wondering again why he won't just write the songs he seems to want to write.

For the last few years, I've felt like Momus was losing his way. JoeMus was the culmination of that, unbearably self-indulgent and self-sabotaging. After three increasingly absurd and experimental albums (Oskar Tennis Champion, Otto Spooky, and Ocky Milk), JoeMus felt like it wanted to be a catchy, frivolous pop record, but couldn't escape its curator's desire to remain a part of the experimental scene in which he had worked so hard to be accepted. Almost every song found a way to destroy itself just when it was getting good.

Hypnoprism may be a light at the end of a long tunnel, or it may just be a sign that Momus has run out of ideas. On one hand, it eschews the excessive use of pitch shifting and time-stretching that made JoeMus so tedious. On the other, it sounds a little like a greatest hits collection populated with songs that were never actually released before. There are distinct echoes of Momus's heyday, with several songs recalling the 1996 album Ping-Pong, and others going even farther back than that. It's nice to hear that Currie can still write a (relatively) straightforward pop tune, but it's also a little worrying to hear him going back to the same old themes yet again. "Evil Genius" and "Death Ruins Everything" are songs he's already written several times over, and "Datapanik" (a eulogy for a crashed hard drive) might have been witty in 1999, but now, it's a little too universal.

At least Hypnoprism ends on a high note, back-loaded as it is with the two best songs on the album. The first, a cover of Josef K's unrecorded "Adoration," is the most successful realization of Afropop yet in Momus's catalog (and surely inspired by his recent collaboration with Vampire Weekend). The second, "Strawberry Hill" is a brilliant pastiche of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Herbie Hancock. It's both the freshest and most refreshing track on the album--if only more of it could have sounded like that!

Two things still appear certain: Momus will continue to make records, possibly until the day he dies; and he will continue to be equal parts fascinating and frustrating.