Manatees- Untitled

by Simon T Diplock

The perfect soundtrack to the next few months of cold days and colder nights

"At a push this is post-rock; no track dips below four minutes and the longest runs to almost 16, but these Manatees do their very best to avoid being caught in one particular genre box. "

Tis finally the season to be chilly. And as winter does at last decide to grace our tiny island, Carlisle trio, Manatees, release their debut effort ‘Untitled’. Luckily, it’s the perfect soundtrack to the next few months of cold days, colder nights and staring into that great big, bad blackness outside your window.

At a push this is post-rock; no track dips below four minutes and the longest runs to almost 16, but these Manatees do their very best to avoid being caught in one particular genre box. Within the sprawling first track alone there are echoes of artists as disparate as Mastodon, Mono, Kid 606 and the Pixies. The second sounds like Tool on a tribal drum trip with Mike Patton and elsewhere there are swirling effects, cavernous screams, walls of impenetrable, metallic noise and a solemn poem made of simple guitar plucks and warped samples.

There is some warmth to be found among the occasional bout of sledgehammer noise and the slow rumbling of a bass guitar that sounds like it has foot-wide cable for strings but this is mostly music that conjures up images of violent, blustery tundra, calm, deep-frozen mountains and the shimmering alienness of the northern lights.

For all this icy power though, there is no cool detachment here. Press play on ‘Untitled’ and expect to be embraced into a different world, taken on the sort of journey that few other records can provide, and not released for the next 45 minutes. Stunning stuff.

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