Last Saturday I was bumming around at the Rough Trade when this album suddenly started flowing out of the speakers. It was a High Fidelity-like when most of the customers, one after the other, stopped doing whatever they were doing, raised their heads, squeezed their eyes a little and moved towards the counter.
It’s not more than a few minutes and I walk away, holding my copy of a disc with a dark black and blue cover.
We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves is an album that can’t make you feel indifferent. The last work of John Maus, who can list in his CV two university degrees and a PhD, is a timeless beauty. It’s not just synth pop, it’s not just cold wave…neither it’s the lost album of the 80s as it doesn’t taste stale and dusty. Sure I can’t help thinking of Andrew Eldritch, Bauhaus, Robert Smith or the The Neverending Story, but this album talks to us of an unsung side of that decade.
With just 32 minutes and few colours on his palette John Maus manages to show us a great variety of landscapes, from the obscure pop of Quantum Leap, to the  Kraftwerk-esque Germany of Matter of Fact; from the reverb-driven 8-bit of Streetlight to the spooky sci-fi march of Cop Killer.
And if the eerie arpeggio of Hey Moon makes the temperature in your room drop, pull up the blankets and let yourself go to the duet between Molly Nilsson and John Maus’s vibrating baritone.
