I Like The Mantles.

The Mantles self-titled LP on Siltbreeze was the record I “slept on” most heinously during 2009, it seems. I mean, I’m pretty sure I had a copy at the end of last year. I remember thinking it was good music for exercising to. I liked the drums a lot, but nothing special. Apparently it didn’t even find a spot on my end of year top # 50. An unforgivable oversight!

Twelve months and many listens later, I see the album for what it is - a startlingly powerful collection of fiery, elegant rock music, strong of playing and strong of song, with my current record-recordin’ hero Greg Ashley at the controls, making sure the whole thing sounds about as ineffable and exciting as such things get in the 21st century – mighty, chiming guitars ringing out across a storm-blackened sky, drum kit crashing through like the desperate hooves of a galloping stallion – all that jazz. I’d bloody love to own it on vinyl.

I guess maybe I thought the whole brooding tone of the record was a bit try-hard at first – all that stern-faced romantic stuff and galloping Triffids/Jacobites melodrama. It’s a tough aesthetic to go for first-time out, with precious few non-failures amid an appropriately bleak landscape of raincoated corpses. Staying focussed, staying low-key and keeping the amps up loud, never over-stepping the mark into pomp and never slackening the pace…. to everyone’s surprise, The Mantles don’t just ride it out but practically redefine it for all time. Whoa.

Nonetheless, they’re a difficult band to write about in yr standard scene-setting/comparison terms, managing to create a music that skims across the surface of a whole gamut of vague underground rock notions without fully embracing any of them, a music with no distinguishing marks, no giveaway slip-ups, just a sound and songs that are familiar yet different, solid and GOOD - like finding a hand-carved wooden object inside a machine, serving it’s purpose perfectly in place of a mass-produced equivalent.

No, I don’t know where that metaphor came from either, but uh… let’s leave it in and move on.

This year’s follow-up EP, ‘Pink Information’ on Mexican Summer, sees The Mantles reversing the natural trajectory taken by a lot of groups, stepping back from the ‘dark, sweeping drama’ approach of their LP in favour of a scrappier, more elemental pop angle, somewhat reminiscent of The Clean’s early material – a pretty encouraging turn of events, I’m sure you’d agree.

Happily, the EP also finds the band’s songwriting (the LP’s weakest hand, relatively speaking) hitting a whole new level. I mean, what can I tell you – “Cascades” and “Situations” and just some of the most compulsively listenable songs I’ve heard this year, twisting and chugging, dead-pan and sweet and cool and… well, just perfect, really. Perfect in a way you never realised was ‘perfect’ until you heard it. There's a wildness here that there wasn't quite enough of on the LP; that bit just before the end of "Situations", where he exclaims "in the laboratory, the midnight hour..." before aborting the verse and ploughing straight back in a final chorus just blows my mind.

“Lily Never Married” is even better, sounding like one of those songs about unhappy family members and cloudy days that Ray Davies used to stick in the middle of mid-‘60s Kinks albums like morbid cries for help, catapulted back to our attention via a flawless Velvets groove and unbearably simple/poignant chord progression – a sad, humane song, using a few chords, a rhythm, a handful of repeated lyrics, to carry the quiet sorrow of an ordinary, wasted life into a place of real transcendence. "Now she's old / what can you say? / People just don't do / that anymore...". Fitting those magic notes and words together, like Ray or Lou Reed used to be able to do every now and again. Five minutes passes in the space of, ooh, two and a half, easy. It’s really, really great.

I don’t like the song “Summer Read” quite so much as I used to, since I clocked the title and realised the opening line isn’t “TREAT ME LIKE A SUBMARINE”, but it’s still pretty good.

After some reflection, I think The Mantles are one of the only American “indie-rock” bands – in the sense of being unaffiliated with the conventions and fandom of garage or pop or punk or noise or psych or whatever else – whose output I really care for at present.

I won’t give you a diatribe about what a hopeless quagmire of nothing all that stuff I shall irresponsibly generalise into the realm of beardy, pitchforky type “indie rock” has become (I refer you to Andrew Earles here for an update on that), but let’s stick to the positive and just say that The Mantles, somehow, are drawing a line straight back to the source, making music like the kind that taught us to love this stuff with all our hearts and souls way back when, before everything on Matador started to sound like the 21st century equivalent of Chicago XIV or whatever – songs that are ragged and noisy and pulse-quickening, but also elusive and grand and dazzlingly beautiful, the same way that Yo La Tengo or Dinosaur or Galaxie 500 used to sound, the first thousand times we heard them.

It makes me want to grab all those people who listen to all their favourite bands from the ‘80s and ‘90s and moan that everything’s gone to shit since people younger than them started releasing records and say LOOK! The Mantles are doin’ it! Right now! Not some weird, badly-recorded punk that you SIMPLY REFUSE to pay £6 for an import 7” of, but all that good shit that you love so much. And they’re not even a bunch of middle-aged guys from New Zealand either! Now get to it already.

Plenty o’ good tunes on their myspace:

http://www.myspace.com/mantles

Labels: I like, The Mantles