Canadian born London dweller Dan Snaith has reintroduced Manitoba with his second full-length release. Up In Flamesis a fantastic surprise, as it is a complete turn around from themeandering simplicity of the relatively trendy instrumental electronicmusic on earlier releases. With vocals, guitars, bombastic organic andsamples drums, feverishly catchy melodies, and a complete overload ofcollected sounds, instruments and an excess of quirky samples, thiscould easibly be one of the most maximalistic recordings by one personin a long while. With the keen skill of roping everything into ablissful melodic soup, this album is easily poised to be thebreakthrough hit of the spring. From the opener "I've Lived on a DirtRoad All My Life," there is no irony, no pulled punches, as the musicjust barrels in with nearly no introduction. A gorgeous interlude endsthe piece with a moment to let things settle in and stays rather lowkey for the instrumental follower. "Skunks" opens and closes with thesounds of frogs (what identifiable sounds do skunks make after all?)but is propelled along with bass and guitar playing, layers of drums,screechy sax, The energy blasts back in with the one-two punch of thetwo vocal tracks "Hendrix with KO," and the single "Jacknuggeted,"which could easily be two of my fave songs on the disc. Snaith isn'tafraid to stack killer drum samples upon drum samples, hand claps, fillthe rest in with gorgeous harp sweeps and always make it a point to endon a good note. With songs like "Bijoux," this one man army hasachieved what numerous multi-member ensembles have only ever dreamt of.If anything, on the vocal tracks, Snaith probably could try and get alittle more confident with his voice so it's not as buried in the mix.Other than that very, very minor observation, this album is flawless.Manitoba is set to tour North America with Four Tet and Prefuse 73.Promises have been made to turn Manitoba into a fully realized liveband with two drummers, guitars and a whole mess of other people. Let'shope this happens.
Two new shows just for you. We have squeezed out two extended release episodes for this weekend to get you through this week. They contain mostly new songs but there's also new issues from the vaults. The first show features music from Rider/Horse, Mint Field, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Anastasia Coope, ISAN, Stone Music, La Securite, Bark Psychosis, Jon Rose, Master Wilburn Burchette, Umberto, Wand, Tim Koh, Sun An, and Memory Drawings. The second episode has music by Laibach, Melt-Banana, Chuck Johnson, X, K. Yoshimatsu, Dorothy Carter, Pavel Milyakov, Violence Gratuite, Mark Templeton, Dummy, Endon, body / negative, Midwife, Alberto Boccardi, Divine. Cow in Maui from Veronika in Vienna. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images! |