Post by thediamonddave on Jul 2, 2007 17:28:35 GMT
Slouching Toward Bethlehem: In Praise of Manatees
May 2007
Carlisle, due to both its unfortunate geographic location and relatively small size, is a cultural desert. On top of that it is a border town, and like most border towns it suffers from that curious mix of an inward-looking, intransigent local population (for whom Carlisle is home) and the outward-looking, intransient presence of the rest of the world (for whom Carlisle is merely a pit-stop on the way to somewhere more interesting). Despite this (or perhaps because of) it does support a small, autonomous, entirely independent community of artists, writers, and musicians who bravely battle on in the face of general indifference from just about everyone else. Even the smallest of places can support a ‘scene’ of some sort, and nowadays, with the press and industry constantly engaged in an ongoing battle to define the ‘next big thing’ and be on the ‘cutting edge’, our best hope of something genuine and vital emerging from our little island is for something to grow organically, internally, away from the big cities and the glare of the media. If there is anything approaching a nascent music scene in Carlisle then, it is mainly centred on that classic triumvirate of venue, label and ‘sound’ – in this case being: The Brickyard, Motive Sounds, and ‘Post-Rock’.
Firstly, let me state flat-out that I loath the term ‘Post-Rock’. Without wishing to get into a game of semantics: what does it even mean? It sounds modern. It sounds futuristic; innovative. But the term has been around a long time, attached to various left-field art-rock groups by various critics since the late 70s (although none of them, I suspect, having a fixed idea of what constituted a ‘post-rock sound’). Something like a definition was attempted by Simon Reynolds in 1994, demarcating post-rock as groups who use “rock instruments for non-rock purposes”. However, he had a specific set of bands in mind; bands who were engaging with innovations in the black-futurist vanguards such as hip-hop and techno; bands such as Stereolab and Bark Psychosis. Nowadays the term seems to be specifically used in relation to a small but significant strand of modern art-rock: those bands who play long, usually voiceless, incremental rock ‘wig-outs’. This strand may be divided further into two distinct styles: those who take the heavier, ‘rockier’ route of Slint and Mogwai (cavernous drum space and chiming guitars building to noisy crescendos), and those who take the more noodling, fusion-like approach of Tortoise, Godspeed!, etc (jazzy, electronica, minimalist). However, anyone with ears that stretch back past 1994 ought to hesitate before using the label as a way of describing them or their music.
If we take the term literally, i.e. as a type of music that emerged historically and musically post-facto from rock, then what about Krautrock? What about Eno? What about post-punk? What about shoegazing? All of these are clear antecedents of this new music, often exploring the same ideas, and often producing very similar results, but as far back as 30 odd years ago. They could all be accused of “using rock instruments for non-rock purposes” (and in fairness to Simon Reynolds, he himself does trace this lineage).
‘Post-Rock’ then, (for want of a more appropriate term) is merely the latest in a long line of ‘Art–Rock’. Head music, sure - not aimed at the heart, or the feet, or the balls – but of a type that still exists as a complete sensory experience: enveloping the listener in its taut, shifting architecture. These are soundscapes not songs: programmatic music for a head film of your own making; low on tunes, but high on atmosphere. Less about composition - more about texture and timbre; the sound of sound; the beauty in the noise. Rock bands, in other words, entering into Eno’s ‘fictional psycho-acoustic space’. Not for nothing is the most common response to post-rock is that it’s “cinematic”. Post-Rock, at its best, is a music that seeks to exploit the tensions and ambiguities inherent in time and space: between fast and slow; loud and quiet; heavy and soft; clean and distorted signals. ‘From noise to entropy’ might be considered its leitmotif.
If there is a danger in all this activity, then it is the danger inherent in all musical idioms: namely its sounds and shapes becoming codified and replicated to the point of cliché. In some respects this has already happened; too much post-rock a simple exercise in crescendo building. A chiming riff is played. This riff is repeated. It picks up speed and emphasis. The band builds to a swell. The band goes quiet again. It’s all a bit predictable. It doesn’t really go anywhere. I ask myself how many ersatz Mogwais a world needs. If post-rock is not to follow prog’s path from hip and genuinely innovative to irrelevant and boring, it must constantly search for the new; constantly explore the very limits of its sound spectrum, and not fall back into familiar patterns. The brain, after all, is a lazy composer, and wants to stay with what’s easy and comfortable. Post-rock, as much for definition as by way of survival, must experiment.
And so to Manatees. My interest in this local three-piece was piqued when their label boss told me that at one of their gigs several people got up and left halfway through the first song. He said they “couldn’t take it”. Figuring that anything capable of provoking such a reaction in today’s apathetic and supposedly unshockable young must be worth seeing, I got myself along to one of their gigs. After a decent enough set from (the splendidly titled) Let Airplanes Circle Overhead, it was Manatee’s turn. The opening drum beat knocked all the air from my chest. They were so much louder than the support, so much heavier. It was rather like suddenly lowering the windows in a car travelling at a thousand miles per hour down a motorway packed with rumbling articulated Lorries. Then sticking your head outside. And this is the thing: I could immediately see why some people wouldn’t be able to handle them. It was physically and mentally disabling: provoking a kind of fight-or-flight response. Many people in fact, upon hearing Manatees, would note the loud, doomy drumming, the heavy, distorted guitar, the subterranean bass, the blood-curdling screams, and mistake them for heavy metal. But they are so much more than that. If you choose to fight the urge to turn your ears away, a remarkable thing starts to happen: what starts as something punishing, something alienating, soon becomes something oddly beautiful; enveloping; rapturous. Heavy metal? Not really, unless heavy metal grew up, cut its hair, and traded its teenage obsession with the devil for a full blown existential crisis.
The sound they make, considering the fact that they are a three piece, is gargantuan; epic, bringing to mind Yeat’s ‘Spiritus Mundi’, with its ‘lion body and the head of a man’ its ‘gaze blank and pitiless as the sun’, stirring its ‘slow thighs’ as it awakes and ‘slouches towards Bethlehem’. Burly drummer Paul Heron is the key player and a real find, able to anchor their wild flights of sturm and drang with beats that range from spacious and toiling bell-like moments to a thunderous torrent of tribal tom-toms. Guitarist Greg Wynne fleshes out the bones of the sound with slabs of crunching power-chords, spine-tingling, icy slide, and a careful and controlled use of white-noise and feedback. Likewise, Bassist/vocalist Alex Macarte wields his instrument like it’s a low-slung, growling power-tool, cutting through the mix with terse, but melodic, confidence. Their gigs often end in an ocean of white-noise and all three pounding drums while the instruments are left to feedback against their amps.
Their first album arrived last year to much local buzz, and it didn’t disappoint. The exquisitely packaged and (rather in-jokily) titled The Forever Ending Jitter Quest Of Slowhand Chuckle Walker: An Introduction To The Manatees is a blueprint for their sound, its five long, segued (untitled) tracks providing a promising foundation upon which to build their tower of song. The first track (XV: XVI) is both manifesto and mission statement, displaying the full gamut of weapons in Manatees’ arsenal: from grinding power-chord work-out, to spacious, dark-ambient drift, and back again. Its 15 odd minutes laying down a challenge to the listener – if you can get through this, it seems to say, then you might be worthy of the rest. Elsewhere there are pieces (VIII:XVI) which build incrementally from mournful, pealing volume-pedal guitar and (I kid you not) church-like plain-chant, to full-on tribal rhythm, nerve-shredding arpeggios and guttural screams, suggesting a new direction for the group: melody and noise in harmonic interplay. Best of all is the last track (X:XXVIII), a riffomatic monster that’s really two minutes of song preceding seven-odd minutes of vertiginous, crunching, waltz-time power-chords. It’s repetition holds you in stasis, they never let the riff resolve itself, resulting in a ‘perpetual climbing staircase’ effect which cranks the tension up and up, knot by knot, until the music eventually collapses under its own weight in a wall of feedback, before disappearing completely in static bursts of the kind of squalling white-noise that makes you think your c.d player is on the blink. It is, quite simply, one of the most thrilling slices of ‘heavy’ I’ve heard for ages. …Chuckle Walker, as old-school heads might say, is ‘a trip’.
So this is Manatees: Carlisle’s secret weapon. A post-rock group that doesn’t really sound like any other. A sleeping giant, ready to awaken and make its way to Bethlehem. I can see great things for this group. In my more day-dreamy moments I fantasize about the addition of other musicians to their sound: a squealing sax player; strings; a virtuoso multi-percussionist. But for now they remain a thrilling clandestine treat. Manatees are the revenge of the provinces: ignore them at your peril.
May 2007
Carlisle, due to both its unfortunate geographic location and relatively small size, is a cultural desert. On top of that it is a border town, and like most border towns it suffers from that curious mix of an inward-looking, intransigent local population (for whom Carlisle is home) and the outward-looking, intransient presence of the rest of the world (for whom Carlisle is merely a pit-stop on the way to somewhere more interesting). Despite this (or perhaps because of) it does support a small, autonomous, entirely independent community of artists, writers, and musicians who bravely battle on in the face of general indifference from just about everyone else. Even the smallest of places can support a ‘scene’ of some sort, and nowadays, with the press and industry constantly engaged in an ongoing battle to define the ‘next big thing’ and be on the ‘cutting edge’, our best hope of something genuine and vital emerging from our little island is for something to grow organically, internally, away from the big cities and the glare of the media. If there is anything approaching a nascent music scene in Carlisle then, it is mainly centred on that classic triumvirate of venue, label and ‘sound’ – in this case being: The Brickyard, Motive Sounds, and ‘Post-Rock’.
Firstly, let me state flat-out that I loath the term ‘Post-Rock’. Without wishing to get into a game of semantics: what does it even mean? It sounds modern. It sounds futuristic; innovative. But the term has been around a long time, attached to various left-field art-rock groups by various critics since the late 70s (although none of them, I suspect, having a fixed idea of what constituted a ‘post-rock sound’). Something like a definition was attempted by Simon Reynolds in 1994, demarcating post-rock as groups who use “rock instruments for non-rock purposes”. However, he had a specific set of bands in mind; bands who were engaging with innovations in the black-futurist vanguards such as hip-hop and techno; bands such as Stereolab and Bark Psychosis. Nowadays the term seems to be specifically used in relation to a small but significant strand of modern art-rock: those bands who play long, usually voiceless, incremental rock ‘wig-outs’. This strand may be divided further into two distinct styles: those who take the heavier, ‘rockier’ route of Slint and Mogwai (cavernous drum space and chiming guitars building to noisy crescendos), and those who take the more noodling, fusion-like approach of Tortoise, Godspeed!, etc (jazzy, electronica, minimalist). However, anyone with ears that stretch back past 1994 ought to hesitate before using the label as a way of describing them or their music.
If we take the term literally, i.e. as a type of music that emerged historically and musically post-facto from rock, then what about Krautrock? What about Eno? What about post-punk? What about shoegazing? All of these are clear antecedents of this new music, often exploring the same ideas, and often producing very similar results, but as far back as 30 odd years ago. They could all be accused of “using rock instruments for non-rock purposes” (and in fairness to Simon Reynolds, he himself does trace this lineage).
‘Post-Rock’ then, (for want of a more appropriate term) is merely the latest in a long line of ‘Art–Rock’. Head music, sure - not aimed at the heart, or the feet, or the balls – but of a type that still exists as a complete sensory experience: enveloping the listener in its taut, shifting architecture. These are soundscapes not songs: programmatic music for a head film of your own making; low on tunes, but high on atmosphere. Less about composition - more about texture and timbre; the sound of sound; the beauty in the noise. Rock bands, in other words, entering into Eno’s ‘fictional psycho-acoustic space’. Not for nothing is the most common response to post-rock is that it’s “cinematic”. Post-Rock, at its best, is a music that seeks to exploit the tensions and ambiguities inherent in time and space: between fast and slow; loud and quiet; heavy and soft; clean and distorted signals. ‘From noise to entropy’ might be considered its leitmotif.
If there is a danger in all this activity, then it is the danger inherent in all musical idioms: namely its sounds and shapes becoming codified and replicated to the point of cliché. In some respects this has already happened; too much post-rock a simple exercise in crescendo building. A chiming riff is played. This riff is repeated. It picks up speed and emphasis. The band builds to a swell. The band goes quiet again. It’s all a bit predictable. It doesn’t really go anywhere. I ask myself how many ersatz Mogwais a world needs. If post-rock is not to follow prog’s path from hip and genuinely innovative to irrelevant and boring, it must constantly search for the new; constantly explore the very limits of its sound spectrum, and not fall back into familiar patterns. The brain, after all, is a lazy composer, and wants to stay with what’s easy and comfortable. Post-rock, as much for definition as by way of survival, must experiment.
And so to Manatees. My interest in this local three-piece was piqued when their label boss told me that at one of their gigs several people got up and left halfway through the first song. He said they “couldn’t take it”. Figuring that anything capable of provoking such a reaction in today’s apathetic and supposedly unshockable young must be worth seeing, I got myself along to one of their gigs. After a decent enough set from (the splendidly titled) Let Airplanes Circle Overhead, it was Manatee’s turn. The opening drum beat knocked all the air from my chest. They were so much louder than the support, so much heavier. It was rather like suddenly lowering the windows in a car travelling at a thousand miles per hour down a motorway packed with rumbling articulated Lorries. Then sticking your head outside. And this is the thing: I could immediately see why some people wouldn’t be able to handle them. It was physically and mentally disabling: provoking a kind of fight-or-flight response. Many people in fact, upon hearing Manatees, would note the loud, doomy drumming, the heavy, distorted guitar, the subterranean bass, the blood-curdling screams, and mistake them for heavy metal. But they are so much more than that. If you choose to fight the urge to turn your ears away, a remarkable thing starts to happen: what starts as something punishing, something alienating, soon becomes something oddly beautiful; enveloping; rapturous. Heavy metal? Not really, unless heavy metal grew up, cut its hair, and traded its teenage obsession with the devil for a full blown existential crisis.
The sound they make, considering the fact that they are a three piece, is gargantuan; epic, bringing to mind Yeat’s ‘Spiritus Mundi’, with its ‘lion body and the head of a man’ its ‘gaze blank and pitiless as the sun’, stirring its ‘slow thighs’ as it awakes and ‘slouches towards Bethlehem’. Burly drummer Paul Heron is the key player and a real find, able to anchor their wild flights of sturm and drang with beats that range from spacious and toiling bell-like moments to a thunderous torrent of tribal tom-toms. Guitarist Greg Wynne fleshes out the bones of the sound with slabs of crunching power-chords, spine-tingling, icy slide, and a careful and controlled use of white-noise and feedback. Likewise, Bassist/vocalist Alex Macarte wields his instrument like it’s a low-slung, growling power-tool, cutting through the mix with terse, but melodic, confidence. Their gigs often end in an ocean of white-noise and all three pounding drums while the instruments are left to feedback against their amps.
Their first album arrived last year to much local buzz, and it didn’t disappoint. The exquisitely packaged and (rather in-jokily) titled The Forever Ending Jitter Quest Of Slowhand Chuckle Walker: An Introduction To The Manatees is a blueprint for their sound, its five long, segued (untitled) tracks providing a promising foundation upon which to build their tower of song. The first track (XV: XVI) is both manifesto and mission statement, displaying the full gamut of weapons in Manatees’ arsenal: from grinding power-chord work-out, to spacious, dark-ambient drift, and back again. Its 15 odd minutes laying down a challenge to the listener – if you can get through this, it seems to say, then you might be worthy of the rest. Elsewhere there are pieces (VIII:XVI) which build incrementally from mournful, pealing volume-pedal guitar and (I kid you not) church-like plain-chant, to full-on tribal rhythm, nerve-shredding arpeggios and guttural screams, suggesting a new direction for the group: melody and noise in harmonic interplay. Best of all is the last track (X:XXVIII), a riffomatic monster that’s really two minutes of song preceding seven-odd minutes of vertiginous, crunching, waltz-time power-chords. It’s repetition holds you in stasis, they never let the riff resolve itself, resulting in a ‘perpetual climbing staircase’ effect which cranks the tension up and up, knot by knot, until the music eventually collapses under its own weight in a wall of feedback, before disappearing completely in static bursts of the kind of squalling white-noise that makes you think your c.d player is on the blink. It is, quite simply, one of the most thrilling slices of ‘heavy’ I’ve heard for ages. …Chuckle Walker, as old-school heads might say, is ‘a trip’.
So this is Manatees: Carlisle’s secret weapon. A post-rock group that doesn’t really sound like any other. A sleeping giant, ready to awaken and make its way to Bethlehem. I can see great things for this group. In my more day-dreamy moments I fantasize about the addition of other musicians to their sound: a squealing sax player; strings; a virtuoso multi-percussionist. But for now they remain a thrilling clandestine treat. Manatees are the revenge of the provinces: ignore them at your peril.
