John Maus’ lo-fi experiments have been dismissed as vintage-electronica wankery, but that can’t account for how much of We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves lingers in the ears long after the album’s end. As on his previous two records, Maus kneels at the altar of ’80s-era synth pop, muttering incoherently like Ian Curtis after a concussion, but he’s succeeded in giving Pitiless Censors a captivating cohesion. Across the album, delicate ballads (“Hey Moon”) drift across tense, sparkling keyboard riffs (“Keep Pushing On”), eventually building into the epic closer “Believer,” a soaring, otherworldly haze of keyboards, bells, and ghostly chanting.