Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Manilla Road
Label: Shadow Kingdom Records
Released: 2013
Runtime: 49:52
Rating: 2.5/5
Kansas legends Manilla Road are back with a new album, »Mysterium«. Right after the pale » Playground Of the Damned«, which was a bitter letdown following the excellent »Voyager« (2008), especially with its thin-sounding production, Mark »The Shark« Shelton and crew decided to quickly scrub off that discographic stain. They only partly pulled it off, though.
In terms of production, »Mysterium« brings back the muscular look of Manilla Road’s once-brilliant epic metal punch and stature, and that’s a nice starting point, but it still only partly meets the high demands of metal standards in the new millennium. The production buried the guitar riffs too far in the background of the album’s sound.
The band keeps up that recognizable pattern that earned them the »epic« tag in the first place, once again with long atmospheric intros that slowly build up to the climax of an opening assault of a distorted guitar phrase. But only the last twenty minutes of the record deliver on that in full. That means the last three tracks on the album. The most grotesque thing about the whole business is that the more you love Mark Shelton’s desperate vocal performance, the better you get through it. The band’s most diehard fans wouldn’t swap him for any Ronnie James Dio. The average Manilla Road fan really doesn’t deserve as many half-hearted guitar phrases on the album’s sound as there were on »Playground Of The Damned,« and there’s a hefty helping of them on the new album »Mysterium« too. Still, it seems the thing that matters most to them is getting to revel in the »untouchably genius« nasal whine of their hero Mark Shelton. You could say that this is a protective element of the band and also a welcome blindfold, one that lets them, knowingly or not, hide their lack of inspiration when writing new material.
The lineup, which obviously spent its best years on the albums »Crystal Logic«, »The Deluge« and »Open the Gates«, i.e. in the golden middle of the eighties, simply can’t manage to put together an album at the quality level of »Voyager« (2008). The Grey God Passes and, right behind it, Stand Your Ground are built on riffs chewed over a thousand times, and on riffs that nowhere near reach the massiveness demanded by the simple arrangement format of Manilla Road compositions, which use no keyboards or programmed samples to get the atmosphere firing. Of course the fan base will be happy, since they love one of the most grotesque vocals around, which stays as nasal as ever, dully hollow, and in falsetto even shakily unconvincing. We’re back at a vocal that must not be an excuse! That’s the band’s biggest grotesquerie. They have a dreadful singer, yet everybody accepts him and bows down to his vocal performance. Luckily, the harmonized guitar passages and solos rescue the lukewarm riff skeleton and development of both opening tracks and breathe some much-needed color and dynamics into them.
The album would have worked better with the third track, The Battle Of Bonchester Bridge, as the opener. It’s built on an excellent atmospheric intro that grows slowly, slowly, slowly and effectively tips over into a sudden distorted roar. The track closes with yet another excellent solo from Mark Shelton. This is the first time on the album that the band’s recognizable epic, bombastic element steps into the foreground. Sadly, the rest of the album, track by track, is once again lukewarm, very average, and the main riffs sound worn out and uninspired. Shelton’s vocal covers »Hellroadie’s vocal lines at most points. Their duets are similar, sure, but Patrick’s voice isn’t used even once for singing the tougher, higher-lying melodic sequences, which is a shame. Do What Thou Will sneaks in a bit more »doom« sentiment, which is also typical of the primordial face of Manilla Road’s music, but the track once again goes nowhere. Šele pospešena Only the Brave is a taste of the old-school Manilla Road proto-speed metal, where the album suddenly wakes up as the main phrase effectively builds into a pompous chorus anchored in a fateful grammar of doom, driven by the undeniable drama of foreboding in Shelton’s nasal vocal. On this track the band’s new drummer Neudi (Roxxcalibur, ex-Savage Grace) also properly opens up for the first time, and he shines in full swing again only on the closing title track of the album.
The album really picks up with the ballad The Fountain. The acoustic track is funny enough, but actually one of the highlights of »Mysterium«. That goes for the use of vocal duets with Hellroadie too. Shelton carries a deeply rooted, sinister, dark vocal performance that pays off in full, especially within this track with its organic-sounding tenor, even though the verse is cut into a major-key melody. I still can’t get past the phenomenon of how such average nose-singing can fire things up so effectively. But watch out. The vocal is the sieve for Manilla Road fans. The sensitive listeners will just weep bitterly, throw up their hands over »Mysterium« and spin their favorite Metal Church, Omen, or Liege Lord album again instead.
The assured The Fountain is an excellent warm-up for the highly ambient instrumental The Calling, which, together with the album’s title track, should really have opened the album. That way the band’s lack of inspiration in ideas, execution and production, or rather that of its leader Mark Shelton, would have been much better disguised. The Calling develops much like the intro of the album »Voyager«. Eerie, dark, alienating. When you suddenly find yourself on an icy planet, buried in a snowstorm, where you’re met by a third-rate parasite or something even worse. One that intends to use your body for its own reproduction and the spreading of its species (pure Alien stuff). A truly fully effective intro to the title track. Completely instrumental, just so we’re clear. Mysterium is a track that develops in a similar way to The Battle of Bonechester Bridge in its opening section, but unlike the latter, Manilla Road bring together at the end a dramatically vibrant atmosphere of epic grandeur and unpredictable turns of events, all weighed down with a fresh dose of excellent Mark Shelton solos. A track that leaves the album’s finale with an extremely convincing sense of total apocalypse! Exactly what metal demands!
You’d really expect more dynamite from Manilla Road. There’s a lot of uninspired material and needless space-filling on the album, with chewed-over, trivial riff solutions that perhaps worked in 1977, when everything that roared and crackled was good. Luckily, what pulls the album out of below-average territory is Shelton’s excellent solos across the record and the last twenty minutes, which justify the band’s name. Once again the outdated way of producing is a problem too. It doesn’t matter whether the band recorded the album on the first take to capture the record’s »liveliness and dynamics«. What matters is how they try to deliver that quality to the listener in the final mix of the sound. And they failed at that. The riffs simply don’t shine, and most of the tracks don’t build atmospheric peaks, but keep the listener in a kind of lukewarm-cold experience that you can’t shake even after spinning the record several times. Sadly. The fish rots from the head, and Shelton will have to pull his head out of the sand and go get advice from those sound engineers who shape the face of modern metal production in the new millennium. If his ego keeps being stubborn on this point, it won’t bring anything good for any potential new studio releases from the band down the road. »Mysterium« is an album of mixed feelings, and it’s clear that with a bit more emphasis on polishing the sound and more careful merging of the ideas behind the basic motifs, it could have been a gorgeous studio manifesto for the band. As it is, we’ll have to wait a little longer again.
Line-up
Mark Shelton – vocals, guitar
Bryan “Hellroadie” Patrick – vocals
Josh Castillo – bass
Andreas “Neudi” Neuderth – drums
Production
Mark Shelton
Tracklist
01. The Grey God Passes
02. Stand Your Ground
03. The Battle of Bonchester Bridge
04. Hermitage
05. Do What Thou Will
06. Only The Brave
07. Hallowed Be Thy Grave
08. The Fountain
09. The Calling
10. Mysterium
