A collaborative project between these two underground heroes of electronic dance music had the potential to take the best elements of both producers' skill sets and make one of the most powerful, essential albums of 2007. Instead of saving the world as the goofy title boasts, the abortive album represents exactly what happens when egocentric hype overtakes substance.
Both Michael Mayer and Aksel Schaufler know how to write good—even great—albums. Touch, Mayer's 2004 full-length, offered some lush productions that hinted at Kompakt's consecutive shift to maximal techno and neo-trance. Schaufler's Superpitcher project achieved international critical acclaim and superstar DJ status with his definitive schaffel-house album Here Comes Love earlier that year. With such astronomical expectations surrounding this new release, their first album as the unimaginatively dubbed SuperMayer, perhaps I should have anticipated the disastrous results.
From the very start, SuperMayer Save the World instills such dread that it suggests the aural catastrophe that follows. Glib introduction "Hey!" leads into "The Art of Letting Go," a DFA-esque bit of insipid dance rock with cut-and-paste funk so apparently formulaic and sequenced that it immediately presents the guys as either well-meaning imposters or lousy comedians. Failures such as "The Lonesome King" and the unbearably kitschy "Cocktails For Two" endeavor to maneuver the downtempo quandary, the former being particularly unlistenable. Even the proper dance tracks consistently miss the mark when held against the potent discographies of Mayer and Schaufler. The pointless "Planet of the Sick" utilizes repetitive old school rave stabs and effected, layered vocals that manifestly lack the melancholic cool of Superpitcher's "People" or "Even Angels." Mired in vapidity, "Two Of Us," released as an advance single, necessitates such an immense amount of patience to sit through that it seems implausible that one would care to actually dance to it.
Quite possibly the worst album I've heard all year, SuperMayer Save the World requires more than just an open mind; it entails a superhuman ability to withstand vainglorious artistic excess. It should be noted that Mayer runs the Kompakt label, which seems to be the only logical reason why this godforsaken self-indulgent dreck was actually released instead of incinerated. I have a hard time accepting that should this have come to his attention in the mail that it would have been given even a fraction of his time. If Mayer and Schaufler ever expect to return to past glories in the face of such masturbatory shark-jumping, this had best mark the end of their days as a costumed crime-fighting / production duo.
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