ONE YOU MAY HAVE MISSED IN 2010: MANTRIC’S THE DESCENT
Our “Top 15” lists will be released on Thursday, but let’s face it, you all barely read the descriptions we write about each album; it’s way more fun to just look at the albums, scroll to the bottom to see what we ranked #1, then fire off a hasty and ill-informed barb in the comments section. So I’d like to take a few minutes to tell you about Mantric’s awesome album The Descent, released earlier this year on Prosthetic, in greater detail; it’s a phenomenal debut that hasn’t turned nearly as many heads as it should have.
Some bands are content to rehash and follow what their peers are doing; others are content to rehash and follow what their peers are doing while changing the equation up just a little bit; still others are willing to completely think outside the box and create something truly new and original. Mantric are in the latter category, and The Descent is a stellar debut record that’s one of the freshest sounding of 2010.
Don’t get me wrong: Mantric still use distorted guitars that play riffs which one would describe as “metal,” they have a drummer, they have a bassist and they have a vocalist. It’s not like some band from the planet Zork in a faraway Universe has come to Earth with a 72-part ensemble of completely foreign instruments and has completely changed the way we think about music; Mantric are a metal band, and as such they do use plenty of metal tropes. But their sense of musicality — the note and aesthetic choices that make any one band instantly recognizable as that band — is completely unique. Mantric sounds like Mantric; their Mantricness is instantly recognizable. It’s really rare these days that you find a band like this, which is why I was so excited to find out about Mantric.
Their sound is proggy and experimental but not overindulgent or masturbatory in the slightest. It’s melodic and heavy, catchy and dissonant, head-spinning and easy-to-follow, simple and complex, metal and non-metal, all in equal, simultaneous measures. It’s the perfect balance of everything. There’s no pre-defined metal micro-genre that you can easily dump it into. Mantric ARE that rare band.
Of course, describing music is kind of like describing a color to a blind person — you can give some approximation, but it’s impossible to truly nail it — so I encourage you to head over to Mantric’s MySpace to check out a few tunes and see what I’m talking about.
-VN
