Pitchfork

I wish I could come up with a cool anagram for my name. Or at least a sensible one. I've tried for several train rides now and about the best I can come up with is "A Joint Rage." Some others: "A Jargon Tie," "Tora GI Jane," "Jeana Griot" and "A Gear Joint." I think it's the "J" that throws things off. There are only so many places in a word where you can put that thing. Adam Pierce, on the other hand, is sitting pretty. Not only can you jumble up the letters in his name to get such useful not-sequiturial phrases as "A Mad Recipe" and "Acid Ampere", you can also get "Mice Parade". And as Pierce has now proven over the course of five albums, Mice Parade is a damn good thing.

The usual terms often get bandied about at Pierce's expense when talking about his music: post-rock, IDM, organica, even new age (wait! Don't hit "back" yet!). But the music he makes is, for all intents and purposes, genreless, which likely explains why people have such a hard time defining it. His sense of arrangement and typically static harmonic structures frequently lend his music an otherworldly, trancelike aura, but the more subtle element that so often makes it transfixing is rhythm, which is never absent for long. Every carefully placed element in his arrangements somehow nudges the song forward, from obvious things like Pierce's impressive drumming and inconspicuous programming to more unusual elements like his kinetic acoustic guitar playing and always-handy synths.

Pierce's acoustic work is especially omnipresent on Obrigado Saudade, often forming the backbone of its compositions. "Milton Road" rides solely on the back of his frenetic strumming, sweeping in with freezer blasts of overdubbed electric guitar at carefully spaced intervals. He spends most of his time alone on these songs, joined by guests on fewer than half of the tracks. In fact, he gets a full band together only once, for "Mystery Brethren", a breathtaking improvisation that gets off to a jumpy start with swirling keys and clouds of vibraphone riding Pierce's sizzling, repetitive drum groove. Chris Conti's guitar is less percussive than Pierce's typically is, but still has that perpetual forward momentum that distinguishes Mice Parade.

HiM's Doug Scharin gets behind the traps for "Out of the Freedom World" (a titular response to Mice Parade's own "Into the Freedom World", from 2001's fantastic Mokoondi), laying down a typically solid foundation for Pierce's flights on the cheng, a Chinese harp of which he's made excellent use since first introducing it to his music four years ago. It's not all instrumental pattern-building, either: Pierce lends his detached tenor to the driving, acoustic guitar-led "Focus on a Roller Coaster", lending the track an uncharacteristic sense of form and melody.

It seems unlikely that Mice Parade will ever make a truly amazing album-- the music is almost too consistently gorgeous to create any defining moments-- but so far Adam Pierce and his abettors have yet to make an album that falls short of worthwhile. This is music just about anyone can enjoy, either for close listening or simply ambient sound, and that's perhaps where Pierce's use of an anagram of his name for his main musical project becomes most appropriate. The structure of this music allows easily for the free rearrangement of a set group of sounds into a huge number of different patterns and textures, and the more you rearrange, the more interesting those patterns and textures become.