Maserati, Inventions for the New Season

Like Mono and Explosions in the Sky, Georgia’s Maserati interpret instrumental post-rock as a vehicle for the delay pedal. Though less famous than their artistic peers, Maserati have become masters of the genre in their own right. Inventions for the New Season is easily Maserati’s best album, in part because the band have tweaked their sound to accomodate Gerard Fuchs, whose tasteful yet propulsive drumming recalls the hypnotic thump of techno but without the artificial perfection that makes dance music sound so cheesy to rock fans. Fuchs is such a strong presence that Inventions frequently sounds like another of his bands, Turing Machine.

Like Turing Machine, on the level of the riff, Maserati are consistently exciting, and frequently beautiful to boot. On higher levels, however, the band has little to offer. Maserati have become experts in dynamic shifts, rewriting riffs ingeniously to fit different levels of intensity, but they never reach beyond simple dynamics to any real composition: their songs simply don’t go anywhere.

This is not a categorical failure for the band, as some long songs, like “Synchronicity IV” and “Show me the Season” go further afield than others and are the more successful for it. But none of the songs on Inventions are unpredictable; Maserati’s music never has the revelatory quality of great instrumental rock. In this respect, Maserati is outclassed not only by the monsters of post-rock but even by bands from their own state, like Cinemechanica, whose instrumental work dances with the furious joy of a whirling dervish, or the little-known C’est Mortel, who exploded post-rock into vast, ambitious suites, or even Deerhunter, who prove, like the best kraut-rock bands, that though a song may be repetitive, it need not be stagnant. Maserati has always been a good band, and in the past few years they have come to be even better. But until they decide to take their music somewhere new and surprising, they will never be a great band.