Mefjus
Manifest

What future, ladies and gentlemen, it is the usual electronic album spawned from a laptop with the latest trendy DAW, made in three days with one hand (the other is busy on Pornhub). It is now clear that we must beware of the unfortunate European generation of neuro producers close to Noisia and the whole band of Germans like Phace and Misanthrop. The Austrian Mefjus (Martin Schober), the usual thin blond with dark circles and a somewhat tormented look, let's say damned, him and his sulfurous laptop, now also joins the group of miscreants. After a not to be despised debut album from a few years ago, it's time to play with the big boys through Manifest, a super sober title for a production distributed by Vision Imprint, the Noisia label (ouch). Are you still with me? Well, the future is the usual album filled with knob twittling and industrial-scale hedonism, nothing concrete to say, but much longer than expected. About 70 minutes of pure avant-garde to shout with all your joy and excitement for the dnb album of the year on YouTube.

Since this is an album, let's say epic, it starts with the inevitable ambient intro with an angry nigga, that goes nowhere but who cares, listen how epic it is. Fractured seriously kicks off the games with violence, as if to say that this future is hard and uncompromising. Even without ideas, the usual convulsed-sawtooth bassline heard a thousand times, katana slashing samples, Spencerian pan shots on the head (?) and the damned compressed snare, which will haunt us for THE WHOLE ALBUM. The same snare and stock beat that characterizes Phace's sound, innovations that unravel years of work and evolution of jungle first and the real drum and bass later, but this is the future folks, we cannot look back. Physically, Work It, Muskox, Pivot, and Assembler remind us that we are in an album produced by Noisia, and therefore it is good to maintain stylistic continuity, as a result, we have tracks more or less compatible with Outer Edges, the last effort of the Dutch trio, which was already not much but at least defined their technical ability. Not that Schober is much less in terms of skills, he's a decent emulator, but once again it's the triumph of form over substance: compositional ability is poor if not nonexistent, the tracks flow without leaving anything, moreover with the already mentioned poetic addition of compressed sounds and the intrinsic ambiguity between generational imprint or technical limit.

Something is salvageable, and as usual, it is when trying to recover already explored paths, like The Sirens, which after the longest charge intro in history leads to the typical Concord Dawn bassline, and a more conventional drum machine, it actually seems like a Concord Dawn track, though without their flair and ideas. Equally salvageable is Sleazebag, thanks to the unhealthy atmosphere it manages to create with synths and rhythmic structure, but it is nothing more than what Johnny L did with his Piper centuries ago. The future has arrived people, but perhaps I am not ready yet, I retreat to reflect listening to Warhead by DJ Krust.