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SlowBurnBlue – Mangabros

By JC Luff

Throughout the composition process of this review, I have been listening to the work I have set out to describe with a pocket recorder (or unplugged electric bass guitar) clenched tightly in my office recliner, putting together scraps of thought that will attempt to provide for an account of my listening experience, one of such fragments being :

A dangerous and opaque celebration of an obligatory departure from communicable reality through the walls of self conception and into the outskirts of mind, on the wings of an electrical socket and some furniture.

I have spent a couple days listening to the Mangabros, and their creations have consumed my intersection of space in time most efficaciously, providing for a change in pace to my weekend that has inspired some useful scribbles . The Mangabros do not produce ambient music to play over a cup of tea and some baked goods with company on a summer afternoon, they produce an architecture of sounds to convey a poetry that will surely inspire one to go forth and create, leaving weird splatters of ectoplasm on the walls of what used to be the daily state of affairs.

“SlowBurnBlue” from the Mangabros (hailing from the UK) is an experience that (in my experience with the album) will leave a different impression after each listening session as the atmospheres are elaborated. I am almost tempted to set up ultra-violet lights and radio equipment to measure the electromagnetic ambiance of the environment where I have been listening to the Mangabros, but it is probably best for my psychiatric health that I leave some things unexplained.

It is not usually my policy to make mention of intoxicants in my compositions, however (as an exception), I feel that I should advise the first time listener to the Mangabros that operating a motor vehicle, or otherwise traveling out and about, through traffic and such is to be avoided…

“A short while Later” :

After a few sessions of listening, I now find myself in the process of calibrating my sound system to reproduce the sounds of “Test one” as best I can, so as to enjoy the full scope of the production work I am about to soak my weekend psyche through. I have never before listened to an album that begins with a sound-check… The game has now changed

The evening activity sets in to brace my silence for a rearrangement of this mortal conception of the local scenery… and all I can scratch down on my notebook is that listening to the Mangabros is one hell of an activity.

As I proofread my final draft of this review for the Mangabros,

I “follow the signal into these late hours through a gripping submersion into a deep pool of sonic flash lights, leaving only brilliantly processed shadows to retrace my steps back to waking mind, keeping a pocket recorder providing more questions than answers beside me, to at some point find myself before a frothy mug of rich and hypnotic bass in the corner of a downtown hotel room, chain-smoking and trying not to allow my mind to cave in on itself”.

I can say with the utmost of certainty, that (outside of jam sessions) it has been over ten years since a work of music has (by a mechanism beyond the grasps of my descriptive ability) has forced me into a recliner, scaling up and down an unplugged instrument while my office takes on the ambiance of what I can only describe as being a jilted gray-scale parallel to Andy Warhol’s notorious “Factory” of the nineteen sixties on a Sunday afternoon in the vinyl siding fields of North-American suburbia.

The synthesized melodies are interwoven into a smoky fabric assembled in multitudinous nerve blurring structures of a trip through a concise poetry that has brought me to the ledge of a day unknown in the life of a future.

The soulful melodies and potent vocal stylings entrance my fleeting attention to the point that I am in fact having difficulty proofreading. I am experiencing something similar to a disassociative effect, but the narratives re-assure me that all is not well in this world, so I have somehow been allowed to continue.

“The eerie siren song of a post apocalyptic rain fall”

Is one of the many descriptions brought into the light of my participation in the work of the Mangabros between listening sessions, and it seems to be that each time I listen to “SlowBurnBlue” , new shapes of poetry sprout up between the floor boards of the listening mind, keeping me on the ledge of the beyond. Harmoniously disintegrating the furniture behind the eyes and between the ears.

I am not going to suggest to people that they go out and seek to be resuscitated, but (speaking for myself), if I were to be artificially resuscitated, I would require a sound track from the Mangabros to do justice to the morning after.

Enjoy the experience.

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