While Mouse On Mars traffics in squelches and blips born from electronic equipment, the group's odd amalgams derive from old oompah folk as much as anything new and mechanical. That time-collapsing makes for a rush of disorienting thrills—imagine Buster Keaton tumbling through the set of Tron—but it also helps root Mouse On Mars in a musical tradition that never falls too far from view. When the duo is at its most approachable, stirring songs drift out of its frantic aural mishmashes, finding a controlled center amid all the dizzy spin.
That trick has been Mouse On Mars' stock in trade since it first found fans within the post-rock fold, and it plays out all over Radical Connector. "Mine Is In Yours" opens with a glitchy smear of keyboards, lumbering low-end beats, and vocals pitched at a tender robotic tenor. After guitar lopes in and synthesizers turn spacey, the carnival gets going proper: "Wipe That Sound" and "Spaceship" march through parades of gloppy sonics that evoke laconic cheerleaders gyrating to the maximal splatter of Basement Jaxx.
A warmer, more leisurely update of 2001's Idiology, Radical Connector foregrounds vocals to more inviting, song-minded ends. In "Send Me Shivers," a synthetic siren drapes a wide-eyed Björk melody over lyrics spun to "turn on back to a spiral." Moodier songs like "The End" throw out images of killed hearts over beats programmed to sulk and stomp. Similarly midtempo brooders weigh down Radical Connector's middle, but even the meekest Mouse On Mars tracks percolate with too much energy to let blandness set in.