Mansun - Six
Released 1999.
Epic Records.
Paul Draper - Guitars, Vocals, Piano
Dominic Chad - Guitars
Andie Rathbone - Drums
Stove King - Bass
As far as Britain goes, the 90s were a great time for 'cult' bands. On the back of the Britpop boom, and the sudden realization that despite grunge, Britain was a musical powerhouse once again, rock band after interchangable rock band worked their way into the charts. It could be overwhelming at times, and true, many of the bands have been forgotten. Yet, amongst the constant wave of Stone Roses/Oasis clones, some bands stood aside from the rest - similar enough to get a mainstream break, different enough to stick in the head once the break had happened.
Suede were the first. Appearing in 1991, a full 3 years before Oasis, they presaged Britpop and offered a great band could call their own - part Smiths, part Kinks, part Queen, and crucially, absolutely nothing like Nirvana. The Manic Street Preachers weren't far behind, either; they too debuted in 1991, and up until Everything Must Go in '96, their fans were nothing if not a full-blooded cult. Radiohead appeared at this time, too, but they had to wait until 1995's The Bends before they earned themselves a single-mindededly devoted fanbase. (It didn't help Radiohead's case that Creep was a huge hit in America, either.) And then, of course, there was Oasis vs. Blur, which was practically turf warfare, if the media was to be believed.
Mansun got to the party pretty late. 1997, to be precise, with their debut, Attack Of the Grey Lantern. It shot straight to #1 in the album charts, usurping a massively-hyped Blur comeback. Pretty impressive for a new band that didn't get much media coverage; but then, success was to be expected for a band that sounded like a mix of every band I've already mentioned, and that had as unbelievably perfect a debut single as Wide Open Space. Their own cult began to grow.
It was unbelievably harsh on Mansun that Attack of The Grey Lantern happened to come out in 1997. Of course, every British musical event of that year was totally obliterated by 3 things - the even-more-hyped Oasis comeback (Be Here Now), the released of Radiohead's OK COmputer, and the most spectacular Glastonbury festival ever. Every end of year review told us to mourn the loss of Oasis and celebrate the rise of your new kings, Radiohead. Hell, Q magazine did a reader's poll at the beginning of 1998 to find the greatest album OF ALL TIME, and OK Computer WON the da
mn thing!
Like I said, it was truly harsh on Mansun. They could - SHOULD - have been as massive as Radiohead and the Manic Street Preachers would eventually become. But, timing had beaten them.
The fact that they came out with an album almost as good as OKC 2 years later, and nobody noticed, was just cruel.
They'd missed their chance. Life can be a bitch like that sometimes. Six will never appear in a list of the best albums ever. It will never be accepted as a masterpiece by the general public. And it will never be spoken of in the same breath as OK Computer by anyone other than Mansun fans. Few things in music depress, upset, and anger me as much as this.
Yes, this is a masterpiece. It has as many twists and turns as the best prog, displays the same ambition as post-1995 Radiohead, is as anthemic and soaring as Suede at their best, and sounds futuristic enough to make it a distant, more organic relative of Kraftwerk's The Man-Machine (it has enough space-age melodies for that comparison, too). It joins the dots between progressive hard rock and indie, and uses glam rock as the glue, making it a fascinating, unique, and impressive album, but also one that retains a sense of fun, unlike, say, The Mars Volta.
The over-riding feeling is that this is the work of a band who have realized just how good they are, and want everybody else to know, too. There are so many styles brought into the mix, and so many subtle and not-so-subtle touches (they sample Tchaikovsky, which is almost impossible to miss) illuminate proceedings that it's impossible not to be impressed, even when the album appears to lose focus. The lyrics are often brilliant, too, though they are also, like Blur, Suede, the Manics, and Pulp, quintessentially British, and often quintessentially 'student'. Television, for instance, namedrops Sky News, and throughout the album there are further references to Jabberwocky, BP, Stanley Kubrick, Karl Marx, the Marquis de Sade, the Open University, Scientology, Winnie The Pooh, and the 9-minute Cancer (Interlude) appears to deal with Britain's secularity.
Some have claimed that there's a concept to this album. I don't see one. Maybe I'm missing something.
If there's any fault to the album, it's that it occasionally lacks a little straight-forward emotion - that's the reason that the soaring, beautiful Legacy is the highlight of the album. The name of the game, for the most part, seems to be total sonic insanity - you never quite know where you are, and that's half the beauty of it. You could say it's also sometimes hard to take the album seriously; but then, I don't think that's the point. The lyrics wouldn't reference Winnie The Pooh otherwise, and they wouldn't have dived so blatantly into all the elements of prog rock that had been subjects of ridicule for so long (the album is divided into two 'suites' divided by an 'interlude', for instance).
Six is a genius construction. Whether you look at it as one 70-minute long song, or 70 1-minute long musical fragments (and it does feel like both sometimes), it consistently impresses, confuses, provokes, and stuns throughout that whole time. It has its flaws, but they're endearing ones - they lend a human warmth to it.
It seems that this album's been forgotten by all except - it pains me to say - Pitchfork Media (see their review of The Mars Volta's De-Loused In The Comatorium to see what I'm on about). It deserves a far better fate than that. There is nothing else in my collection that sounds just like this, and yet somehow, it sounds a million other things at once - it renders the album instantly familiar, and yet new and exciting.
4.5/5
Recommended Downloads
Six
The opener, and title track, sets the scene for the album pretty much perfectly. It begins with some effects-laden guitar arpeggios and piano, before simple plam-muted chugging guitars come in. It continues in a fairly normal vein for about 2 minutes (this is about as normal as the album gets), before everything dies away, and a new riff comes in with pounding drums. This leads to the 'chorus' ( "I feel no pain....." ) , which drives itself along with a punky agression. Then, there's an ambient interlude, with pitchshifter pedals in action and all sorts of space-age effects darting all over the place. Then about 4 minutes in, the chorus returns almost out of nowhere. After this, there's something that approaches a guitar solo - it sounds more like a machine breaking down - as the song slows right down, and it returns to the chugging, palm-muted opening. There's some strange, under-water style effects over Draper's vocals this time round. Then the song fades into feedback, ready for the opening riff of Negative.
Television
Opening with '1, 2, 3, 4' count-in and a riff that could have been sampled from any of the garage-revival bands that came to prominence at the start of this century. After this, it moves towards ambience for the verse, utilizing samples and some totally alien guitars. After a sample of Sky News (a British TV channel), Draper soars into the chorus. After one more round of this, there's a guitar solo that makes gratuitous use a pitchshifter again; the Sky News sample returns, sped up and seemingly disappearing off into the distance. The song ends with a long rallentando, before going into static fuzz, the long beep of a life-support machine, and a 2-second sample of the American national anthem.
Legacy
Probably the most perverse thing about this album is that the best song is the one that's both the most out of place, and the most normal. Legacy is one of those universal ballads - it's apparently about nothing, but it could applied to a lot of situations. The chorus is absolutely world-beating - as Draper leaps into that falsetto, your heart seems to leap with him. The melody is just perfect - Mansun's melodies are consistently good, and this is definitely their best. Even people who don't have the patience for the rest of the album, or who just don't like it, should love this song.
Since Soulseek doesn't work for me I'm kind of stuck really.
