Mandy, Indiana
Liverpool, Rough Trade
March 29th
As part of their brief, UK tour before reaching Europe, Manchester’s Mandy, Indiana, bring their new album, URGH, to Liverpool. By Ryan-Lewis Walker.
It’s not insignificant that Alex Macdougall, drummer of Manchester’s Mandy, Indiana, should be wearing a My Bloody Valentine t-shirt. Between the subtle snaps of a butterfly bouncing between a chain-smoking troupe of dead flowers and fits of speaker-splitting abrasion that feels like your scalp is being flayed by the strip thanks to oncoming storms of solar flares – Mandy, Indiana, having newly released URGH, their second album via Sacred Bones, in their own wild, on their own weird terms, oscillate on the line that Loveless once, and still does, occupy.
Macdougall is joined by vocalist Valentine Caulfield, guitarist and producer Scott Fair and synth player Simon Catling for what is a set mainly dedicated to airing tunes from the new record. Excluding Pinking Shears and Drag [Crashed] from 2023’s i’ve seen a way, the former a devastating deployment of column-collapsing bass, worming and warbling away amongst unsettled nests of rhythmic scrapes, the latter leaning deep into the industrial-techno territory, shaking with sonorous drama, spatial hypnotism, spiritual holograms, muzzled grumbles and caustic, mechanical grime from the bowels of a meat packing district, this afternoon sees the four-piece play Liverpool’s Rough Trade at 12pm with a focus on their new work.
A Brighter tomorrow envelops everything in its cocoon of television static, before being joined by an earthquake of bass, bone-on-brick percussion, crazed squiggles of heart-tranquilising soundscapes and a haunting melody flickering in and out when a space should be available between these corrosive uploads of disciplined noise. Space is important. It soaks things up. It sucks things dry. Elsewhere, in all its insatiable bloodlust, in all its courtyard of redemption-hungry, polyhedral orgasms and shadow barks, I’ll Ask Her nails out feet into the floor and blows our backs to the walls. A comment on rapists who remain free.
”Light as a feather/stiff as a board” – Life Hex is a hellish bodily-entanglement of surface-scarring action. A fragmentary fusillade of laughing beats palpitating at all posts, dense films of television static, structures and intricate chambers of sound encompassing enough to drown in once they have been boiled down to a few twitching piles of random bits and kicked back together until an irreconcilable, irregular configuration has been birthed.
Likewise, the feral machine hiss and agitated colony ist halt so ensures that things move, moult and manipulate spaces in ways completely unexpected. Things shapeshift. Things splinter. As though one section of the song is baited by something beyond the peripheries of what we hear, and so, is led astray by its intuitive, distracted inquisitiveness. In this space of time, this grid, this gap, nothing is spared. We break our teeth against these bizarre abstractions – a beat glaring down the centre of the axis: some electrocuted drill ‘n’ bass, some barmy, battlestar rave, some seige of fat-fisted breakcore, some film scores, some devolving pockets of horror we are folded into and forced to breathe in.
Magazine offers elasticated tunnels of bombastic rhythms, nuclear spirits empty rooms and then eat walls, a batch of mischievous machines exhaling shrieking mosaics of mutilated noise explodes like sharp cartridges shattered glass to the side of the face, while the extreme heat of Cursive, in all its mechanoid glory, seize hold of imaginary details, and feast on them in the exposure -dirty spells of nursery rhyme commanding the elements to come together: lysergic trips of heavy-breathing drums, leviathan and primal, harsh squelches of synths, lashes of percussion, phantasmagorical voices sampled and interspersed into the madness of each composition. It chants and whimpers with the touch of metal sheets slipping in and out of blinding light, of air conditioners taped together at the hinges splitting into pools of deprived darkness.
Frazzled, bedazzling, fragmented, yet teeming with cohesive surge, Mandy, Indiana, leave just enough space for each other one minute, so that something else can sweep in and subsume it the next. In this way, as was typical of their united creation of URGH, Mandy, Indiana, experiences the world as one brain assembled of individual experiences plugged into it and therefore, harness the chaos of the world they see lowering itself into everyday circumstances.
It wouldn’t have worked if it was a Boo Radleys t-shirt, would it?
~
Mandy, Indiana | Instagram | Facebook | Bandcamp | YouTube
Sacred Bones | Website
Ryan-Lewis Walker | Louder Than War
Photography | Jessie Morgan ©
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