Mouse On Mars have always been more interested in open systems, it seems, and on Idiology they’re at their most expansive. The artwork, two eyeholes with an interchangeable insert that allows for multiple covers, is a perfect analogy for the album, where Mouse On Mars seem to do more of…well, everything, really. It features their gentlest, most unabashedly lovely moments, as on the strings and guitar hymnal of “Fantastic Analysis”; their most furious, gabba-informed rushes of tortured beats (“First : Break”); slamming mentasm-blast drone (“Introduce”); a raging two-step stormer (“Actionist Respoke”), and most startlingly, a Canterbury scene dream-song, the gorgeous “Presence”, where drummer Dodo Nkishi sings adrift a landscape of capsizing pianos and flurries of flickering texture. Every Mouse On Mars album is stuffed full of ideas – this one just makes the joyous complexity of their vision most explicit.

– Jon Dale