Labels: Common Thread
Review by: Alex Hannan
The 4 songs on this cassette EP have taken a while to hit the tape shelf – they’re a practice room recording dating from late 2011 which was discarded at the time and later rescued. Glad that they were saved from the scrapheap – this easily punches its weight with the other material I’ve heard from MANGLE, working a sludge/PV sound with extended feedback drones and generally showcasing longer songs. Opener “Schemer” alternates resonant but slyly patterned stonery riffing with clattering fast sections that sound like two Rottweilers fighting in a cage, throaty screaming pairing up with a deeper roar. The song slows to a crawl around two minutes in, drums and guitar spattering slow-motion noise around to a background of feedback.
The noise, feedback and drone that end “Schemer” and start “Fail safe” are exciting as possibilities – as the former song disintegrates and stretches out to near six minutes in length it initially seems as though it’s going to be incorporated into the songwriting, the tight, well-executed riffing elsewhere being counterpointed by bleak abstraction, a skin-crawling inertia. When it abruptly drops out to just one feedback tone and stops it seems it was only intended after all as an extended outro. MANGLE don’t seem to have explored this in subsequent releases, which is a shame – I’d have been excited if they’d followed up the hints of a more out-there style this tape gives us.
“Dividing line” contrasts string-rattling downtuned goodness with fast hardcore, switchbacking hectically between the two types of material in its middle section before returning to the burly slower feel. I can see this and fourth track “-” working well live, but at home, without the power of amps, drums and graft, they lack something. The ideas don’t really grab my attention. “Fail safe”, on the other hand, hits a really peachy riff after its feedback intro, slow and inexorable, guitar and bass starting off in lockstep before peeling off into some perfectly placed harmony work, the kind of detail which makes their better songs stand out. It’s out on Common Thread records, who put out well packaged and cheap tapes, so check it out!