Put a unique and exclusive label on the music of The Manises it’s like trying to catch the air with your hands or hold back the advance of the ocean. It is not an easy task, but as the title of their debut in long-format shows, any brand in which we want to classify them will be well brought, because “All are correct”. And it is that this duo from Elche, made up of Victor Clemente y Ruben Soler, genuinely fits everything. They are punk, they are electronic, they are experiment, they are voracity, they are purge, they are crudeness, they are discomfort and they are relief. This is how their first steps had been sounding within that small underground and transgender universe that they had built since their first demo; now, six years later and counting for the first time with an external producer (and not just any, since we are talking about I-ACE, responsible for the sound of artists like Agorazein or ANTIFAN), the band manages to take their extravagant ingenuity and sign a cover letter that transcends any convention to use.
Converted into two shamans who guide us through fire and the most atavistic percussion, Rubén and Víctor perform their particular and primitive dissertation, making use of a powerful distortion that evolves between bass lines and nocturnal synth-punk with which they will bring out within our most terrible darkness (“one hundred plus one”). There is something in those deep songs that emerge from the most remote and abysmal point of his being that will continue to invite us to be part of a strange tribal and communal dance, without prejudices or confines, that will give us goosebumps and let us go without control or extent. The destination of this singular trip is the least of it; we feel wrapped in that kind of magic generated by intermittent loops that conjure the past and the contemporary (“Dawn”), industrial darkness and earthly emotion (“Anyway”)and the traditional warmth and organic opacity (“Apostles”).
Regardless of the truce offered by the tropical freshness of some of its slopes, friendly and playful, such as “Something that something that” o “3368-CPN”we will not stop feeling that our feet take off from the ground, our eyes do not focus on anything or anyone and we are prey to a vertiginous and irrepressible trance that can only go further thanks to that outrageous frenzy that liturgies with the body of a hymn cause. “VIVO”. The drift of this feverish lance concludes with a six-string sonata (“He’s gone”), devoid of any accompaniment other than that of their own chained voices, which, like a reiterated mantra, manage to put us back on earth, make us regain consciousness and repair the fact of having been completely absorbed for ten songs in a compendium of subjective reflections turned into collective. Undoubtedly, some risky and infrequent wickerwork for a first feature and from which only two reckless and crazy rhapsodes can come out on top. The Manises.