There are a lot of ways that you could set about an examination of Museum of Love's Life of Mammals. There is the obvious point of entry which is the band's influences, a lineup of unassailable greats that range from Scott Walker to Kraftwerk. But I should leave some low-hanging fruit so that the other indie bloggers (endangered creatures that they are) don't starve. There is also the member's social ties, backgrounds in the fine arts, and connections to the NYC indie scene's conquest of metro-borough dance enclaves during the early '00s. But if one more critic writes one more word of (deserved but) effusive praise for James Murphy, I truly believe that it might cause the fabric of reality to fracture and implode into the man's ego, taking us all with it like an apocalyptic reimagining of the ending of Being John Malkovich directed by Lars von Trier. Thanks but no thanks. Instead, I'm going to drive my analytical instruments into the cover art. An attack that I plan to execute as if it were an overstuffed pinate and my mind was an ice hook. Stretch out your palms, goodies incoming (I hope)!
When looking into the partially stunning and confused expression of the face that stares back at me from Life of Mammals's cover, I can't help but be reminded of Lenny Abrahamson's 2014 film Frank- a film about a sensitive man hiding behind his art, represented by an oversized papier-mâché mask, in a sublimation his emotional and physical desires. Now, don't get me wrong, the guys behind Museum of Love are by no means repressed. Quite the opposite in fact. The connection lies in that both Frank's mask and the mask on the cover of Life of Mammals signal a similar thread of derangement through the presentation of a raw and inscrutable mockery of the human facade. Only in the case of Museum of Love's album the mania of the piece is centered in a rather excruciating way, prompting a response that is less "well, that's quirky," and more *furrows brow with extreme concern* ...which is certainly a reasonable response to the album as a whole.
Not that there is anything particularly controversial about Life of Mammals, provided you don't think there is anything contentious about the inversion of time-tested song structures, the willful implosion of does not negate a constrained and lightly twerked pop-appeal. The best description I have to offer you as to what is going on here is to ask you to imagine the sound of someone sliding their fingers into the crease of their brain and flipping it inside out like a two-in-one, reversible dress they picked up on Etsy. It does this with zero moisture content as well, while retaining a certain pliability to its form. It's intriguing if gravely improbable.
The group very much indulges in the kinds of sharp, polished soul and funk of the Bowie's "plastic soul" era, only taking the inherent humor of the style and explicating its components to the point where you're never quite sure when you've hit the punchline, or if it's all the punchline. There is more than a few times when it feels like they've sliced a couple Brian Eno tracks into jigsaw patterns and then deliberately glued them back together in an obtuse manner to produce surreal imagery, like a locomotive galloping on a set of grayhound's legs, or a dolphin cresting with a duck's wing for a dorsel fin. It works as well that singer Dennis McNany has a slurred, deadpan drawl to his delivery, which settles into the groundwater the mix like the quiet electricity that courses through your veins before a tornado lands in your front yard. His voice lends to the ravaging thrash of convention orchestrated by bandmate Pat Mahoney a palpable gloss of the banal dysfunction, like a stigmatism or a history of schizophrenia in your family that your parents often remark on but which you have yet to see any evidence of. A hoary pinkish madness is the mundane reality of the human condition, a fact that is surely reflected in the living truth of Life of Mammals.
