Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Manzana
Label: Dynamic Arts Records
Release: 2008
Length: 40.03
Rating: 2/5
What do you get when you drop vocals with a punk-ish twang into metal, vocals that absolutely have to come off as grating or annoying? Soapy stuff, as we’d say around here (“žajfn’co”). Or, put differently, “fake” metal, and I could probably come up with a few more metaphors. The catch is that none of these quips let us decide in advance that “Babies Of Revolution” is a bad album and write off the Finnish band Manzana on the spot.
Still, a bit of caution is more than welcome here. Finns and Scandinavians in general are known for an innate knack for laying down classic lead melodies in their songs. So Manzana are melodic power metallers, but they veer off that path thanks to a raspy, or let’s say mid-pitched, female voice that often drags the verses out with a punky accent, without overdoing any belly-borne prefix or worrying about how much melodicity this approach drains from the finished song. Here’s the bottom line: it’s a pure commercial trick, stripped of anything complicated. Simple lead rhythms, no guitar soloing, a curtain of riffs building most of the backdrop, with programmed samples added to cement the basic “beats” and synths to beef up the mood of that riff curtain. Nothing wrong with that. Production-wise, the album holds up under any quality test. The sonic interplay between the instruments and the vocals is dynamic, fluid, colorful, and bounces along briskly through the album’s running time.
Manzana will be interesting to the first-generation teenager, maybe even the ones younger than 14 or 13. They go straight for the ears and they’re trivially simple. The vocals are disappointed, angry, and that’s exactly what teenagers are like when they start rebelling against their parents. The vocals build catchy, singalong choruses that even flirt with pop detours in End Of The World, which Nothing As Whole As A Broken Heart confirms. It’s the kind of musical approach you fall for fast, it gets under your skin if you’re still a kid on top of that, you outgrow it quickly and in any case forget it just as quickly (unless this is the first album that introduced you to music with electric guitars). Take the attempt to inject a higher level of “groove vibe” into the album: in the pre-chorus, the song World Is A Wampire is a complete copy, melody-wise, of Still Of The Night by Whitesnake, just with a different approach to singing the verses and a different rhythmic bed.
So don’t go looking for greater depth of expression or any special artistic intellect in “Babies Of Revolution”. I’d maybe just hint that Manzana would appeal to everyone who gets fired up by Evanescence-style pathos, with a mild, occasional dose of Sentenced’s gloomier atmosphere. Thanks to the extremely invasive melodicity, which you could also compare to elements of melodic hard rock and AOR, matching the current “revival” wave in Scandinavia, from Brother’s Firetribe to Lordi, and on to Wig Wam or H.E.A.T., Manzana come across as terribly friendly and harmless, with the look of an innocent cocker spaniel who has accidentally misplaced the rubber chew bone he got from his owner for his first birthday. The basic approach to finding a melody is pretty much the same template as the bands listed above, only the energy these bands radiate outward is different.
On that front, we can conclude that Manzana are just one more “copy-paste” band that tries to escape the inevitable genericness by trying to blur it all with the vocals, which deliberately depart from the proven, effective template for finding that “Scandi melody”. Manzana are a band hoping for commercial success, but they’ve missed the train by at least three years. Average musicians, good musicians, are in this band, but they put out very, very little creative inspiration, if any.
Lineup
Piritta Lumous – vocals
Henkka Virsell – guitar, programming
Klasu Wirzenius – bass guitar, backing vocals
Heikki Malmberg – drums
Tracklist
1. Wash My Sins Away
2. Panda Girl
3. Sweet Revenge
4. Near Death Experience
5. End Of The World
6. Fake
7. Nothing As Whole As A Broken Heart
8. World Is A Vampire
9. Cherry Pit
