Saturday, December 22, 2012

Manes

Manes - How the World Came to an End
Candlelight Records, 2007
Genre: Experimental/Electronic

1. Deeprooted
2. Come to Pass
3. I Watch You Fall
4. A Cancer in Our Midst (Plague One)
5. Last Lights
6. Nobody Wants the Truth
7. My Journal of the Plague Years (Fuckmensch Warmensch)
8. The Cure-All
9. Transmigrant
10. Son of Night Brother of Sleep




Alright, if you noticed the genre listing above it’s pretty obvious that this will be the last Manes album to be reviewed by me.  I really don’t care what else they release after this.  The only reason you’re seeing a review for it now is because I want to let people who liked this band know why I am going to stop and to make others aware that this is a very different project now… even more so than “Vilosophe”.

I must admit, after a few listens I enjoyed the “Vilosophe” album.  Granted it was drastically different from “Under Ein Blodraud Maane” and I naturally assumed they might keep up the experimental and progressive sound.  Typically, that’s not something I really go after, but I thought “Vilosophe” was fairly decent, so I decided to get their following album.  I never expected them to shift into this absolute bullshit found on “How the World Came to an End,” especially after hearing “View”.  This album is seriously absolute shit.

“Deeprooted” is the only song with distorted guitar, as far as I can tell.  Everything else is buried in a sea of electronics so I can’t really tell all that well.  Anyway, at first glance you can tell they were going for something different with “Deeprooted” and at first it was just okay, but then you realize what it sounds like… Korn.  Seriously, the newer Korn material sounds just like this.  Even the vocalist sounds like Jonathan Davis.  I could honestly deal with that to a degree compared to other things, and I never imagined what would come to pass on “Come to Pass” (pun intended).  There is rap on this song.  Rap.  Manes started off as a Black Metal band and this is what they have degenerated to.  The worst part is… they were a good Black Metal band.  A great band, my how the mighty have fallen.  This brings a whole new pinnacle to the word terrible in my eyes.  The more confusing aspect is that this Rap is actually in French for the most part… the band is from Norway, but have French Rap?  Whatever, that’s beside the point.  Now the more shocking aspect here is that I didn’t stop listening to it here.  I did actually listen to the whole album.  Now, I figured the Rap might only be on one song, just so they can hang out with Ulver a bit more on their days off, but the Rap sections show up more than once.  The new world of Ulver and these guys will get along great!  Then they have some Pop aspects here and there singing out incredibly lame phrases like “Lean on me” as a chorus, which reminds of some stupid 80’s Pop song.

The only thing that remained the same throughout this was the dark atmosphere Manes created on prior releases.  However, judging by how quickly they change what they want to do, it could be any moment before they’re writing theme songs for My Little Pony.  They’re clearly trying to make their mark into a whole different genre and attempting some kind of diversified fame and catering to people who listen to shitty music like Coldplay and think “trip-hop” is something to get excited about.  Basically this is Euro-trash avant-garde Pop.  I think Candlelight is trying to compete with Nuclear Blast with this kind of a release, so you can surely expect some more quality releases from them.  I wonder how long it will take for Candlelight to lose all the metal bands they signed.  At this point Gorgoroth might as well start looking for a new home and any other Black Metal or Death Metal band.  And here I thought we might actually have a fairly well known respectable label forming, but one could say that about Nuclear Blast and Century Media in the early 1990’s.  Oh how time does fly.  Furthermore on June 19, 2007 Candlelight prepares to release the Marilyn Manson DVD, so prepare to witness the fall of yet another label that used to bring Metal to the world and is now cashing in on the glory of Corporate American Music.  They will be in bed with Virgin Records soon, no doubt.

The album title seems to work for this release though.  “How the World Came to an End.”  This makes sense since this band starts off with Black Metal and changed into some idiotic Pop group, very similar to what Satyricon is attempting to release at the moment.  More cash for these bands so they can buy up their 12 year old female fans all in the name of spreading evil… or some other pseudo-philosophical motivation a band needs to justify having produced this tripe.  Candlelight even describes this album as “Avant Metal/Dark Rave”, the Rave part I can sort of agree with, but where is the Metal on this?  Is Rave even a genre?  I thought a Rave was a party and they play things like Trance or Techno at Raves?  I could be wrong… I’ve never been to a Rave and I don’t listen to that kind of music.  Anyway, the metal is not really existent, except for that first song, if you actually think Nu-Metal is real Metal, that is.  Even Candlelight seems to want to mask the fact that there is Rap on here for the sake of album sales to the Metal public, they know what their demographics are, but they’re trying to branch out, so why not mask your product?  Don’t expect the world of Metal to be all that respectable for that much longer.  Hell at The End right now you can buy the latest Björk releases.  I mean, it’s nice to see a label achieve success, but at what cost?  Call me an idealist, an over-intellectualized reviewer.  I don’t give a fuck, I know who I am and I know what I do, but what I see happening in the Metal world today is absolute bullshit.  It’s high time someone stood up and told it like it is or else we’ll all be dancing around listening to shitty music like Aqua talking about how we live in a plastic world.  If you want to be a degenerate fuck-up then support this, and judging by most of the humans I deal with, this will get supported.

-End Rant-

Or begin rant... depending on how terrible you think the sample is.


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