Review & Full Album Premiere: White Manna, ARC
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on August 24th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
Stare hard enough at the Rachel Duffy cover art for White Manna‘s seventh album, ARC, and it starts to make a fittingly weird kind of sense in conjunction with the music itself. Collage assembled as a totem, a kind of monolith built from different colors and textures. A watch, a couple slices of fruit, and is that a coffin with clouds on it? Either way, it is evocative, and much the same is true of what occurs sonically on the record’s nine tracks. The follow-up to 2019’s Ape on Sunday (review here) arrives via Centripetal Force and Cardinal Fuzz and is largely a departure from the record preceding, as returning guitarist/vocalist/keyboardists David Johnson and Anthony Taibi, bassist Johnny Webb and drummer/vocalist Tavan Anderson bring aboard Dominic Talvola and Charlie Love, presumably to also handle synth or the other electronic elements that are so prevalent across ARC‘s 38-minute span.
Experimentalism and improvisation aren’t my any means new for the Arcata, California-based White Manna, who made their self-titled debut in 2012 through Holy Mountain, but the pieces that comprise ARC feel particularly exploratory of the far-in as much as the far-out, beginning with the opening title-track’s eight-minute pulse of electronically driven krautery. It is as though the band — who recorded with Taibi at the helm at his own 3D Light Studios — decided it was high time someone recast jazz in their own image and then set about the task with a spacial focus, not letting themselves be hindered either by their own expectations of what psychedelia is or should be, let alone anyone else’s. The resulting material is not necessarily warm or comforting, but neither is it intended that way. Rather, it is a challenge directed inward, a sort of burst of individualism as White Manna push themselves to do new things and explore their methods in ways and with direction that they never have before. If it’s space rock — and I’d argue that at least some of it is — then it’s deep-space rock, and the places it goes may have been touched by humans before, but the footprint White Manna leave in the cosmic dust is undeniably their own.
Special mention as to go to Anderson on drums. The bulk of ARC is instrumental. There is sax or synth-as-sax peppered here and there, as on the later 10-minute kinda-finale “Surfer Moron,” but whether it’s there or on the out-of-nowhere all-go garage-galaxy-punk blast of “Zosser” earlier — as close to a traditional “song” as White Manna here get — Anderson‘s drumming shines as a creative element, not trying to anchor the proceedings to a structure or define where one off-time measure ends and the next one starts, but instead standing in line and on the same mission as the guitars, bass, synth, etc., in pushing outward beyond the common reaches of genre. Even on side A’s 49-second “Pollen Ball,” which is little more than a captured swirl in a jar, the insistence of the snare hits gives more personality and evocative vibe to what accompanies, and though the drums are just one piece of what brings White Manna to such a place of avant garde reach, they’re nonetheless crucial to that outcome from the echoing outset of the Hawkwind-as-heard-in-another-dimension “ARC” onward, its echoing vocals vague and accompanied by far back guitar, cymbal wash and who the hell even knows what else.
A wash of noise emerges and is manipulated. Sax arrives and departs and arrives again, and even the motorik beat eventually splits out, leaving the residual soundscaping to finish the job of keeping the universe on its toes heading into the more electronically purposed “Mythic Salon.” There are vocals there too, but they’re subsumed into the atmosphere as the horns/keys tap out jazzy jabs in interstellar bop, waiting to go on a tear but restraining for the moment at least until “Pilgrim’s Progress” pushes the noise freakout to its most abrasive cast on the record. Scorch, pure and simple, only without the simple. There’s a wide breadth happening but it’s less about that than the consumption of everything around, and all of it — yes, all of it — seems to be swallowed at the last. After that, the relatively minimal “Pollen Ball” feels like a well-earned comedown, and though “Painted Cakes” adds more tension with a John Carpenter-esque synth throb, the presumed end of side A is still a rescue by comparison.
So be it. “Zosser” blasts off immediately from “Painted Cakes” and is righteous in its forward momentum, heavy like Stooges but expansive, and with thrusters on full. The 1:48 dronescape “Soft Apocalypse” follows and is probably its own best description, though there is something urban about its doppler-feeling undulations. Like a slow siren however many city blocks away, the keys that have been there all along become more prominent in the fadeout, from which “Surfer Moron” picks up as the longest single inclusion on ARC and the final argument White Manna make in their thesis on psych-jazz progressivism. The very nature of a record like this — something purposefully constructed as a willful act of exploration on the part of the band; a kind of “we’re going on an adventure and you can come” — means there’s some manner of indulgence happening throughout, and of course that’s the case in “Surfer Moron” as much as anywhere else, but the hypnotic sphere in which it lands is engrossing just the same. Atop a slow-rolling beat, horn peppers notes circa 6:30 that are a gorgeous and ethereal, and the energy uptick from there manages to be a linear build and not predictable as it shifts from its apex smoothly to the epilogue of “Sailing Stones,” the keys, drums and whatever else finishing the swirl before fading out after about a minute.
What the hell just happened? I don’t know, but consider again the totem of the cover art, how its varied ideas come together to express a single idea. With ARC, that idea is White Manna pursuing a space beyond genre and of themselves. It is weird — with glee, weird — and there are moments that come across as playful, but the goal to which they’re driven isn’t just about screwing around and seeing what happens. It’s about seeing how far they can push this thing before it all comes apart. It never does here.
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