Mansun

Scrolling through the sales charts of the Nineties, it's startling to realize how what seemed at the time like a period of decline - at least for music capable of speaking to a mass audience - was actually rich with quality output. The comparison with today's anaesthetized mainstream is downright merciless.

Britain in particular was going through an especially fertile period musically, with a string of artists cutting across genres - from traditional rock to electronic experimentation - capable of shifting huge numbers of records while still delivering highly refined work. So it happened that for two memorable weeks straddling February and March 1997, the top of the UK sales chart was occupied first by the self-titled Blur album and then by the debut from Mansun. Within a few months it would be the turn of names like Chemical Brothers, Charlatans, Radiohead and Verve. Of course the year's best-selling act was the Spice Girls, yet that striking run of names points to a landscape remarkably receptive to adventurous pop-rock.

Looking at those charts explains better than any sociological analysis what Britain of that era must have meant. And it explains how such a peculiar record managed to climb all the way to the top.

Even though it was preceded by a string of singles, no one was prepared for an album like "Attack Of The Grey Lantern". Because the songs that offered a preview of it, taken on their own, couldn't capture the effect of the record, where all the interlinked tracks formed a kind of suite capable of ushering British pop into a new era. A triumph of baroque architecture and futuristic geometry, a sort of musical equivalent of Victorian science fiction. Critics welcomed the album warmly, and several peers voiced their admiration. "A real musical achievement" were the words of Ed O'Brien of Radiohead.

Make no mistake, this is one of the high points of britpop. You could invoke every reference point and none of them in trying to describe it. Singer Paul Draper's declared love for Prince has often prompted comparisons with the Minneapolis genius, though these mostly boil down to the odd falsetto and a perfectionist streak in the studio. The orchestral character and danceable drive of some tracks have led people to invoke Abc's "The Lexicon of Love", while the storyline running through the songs, the tale of the fictional hero The Grey Lantern, has a distinctly Seventies flavour, an era in which both glam and progressive rock attempted similarly conceptual ventures. And yet it's impossible to pin down any precise sonic precedent for this record.

Every song is a maze of instrumental and vocal arrangements, and listening to it induces a sense of suspension rarely found in the music of the period, or since, given that almost no one has tried to follow in its footsteps (unless you dig up Gay Dad's forgotten "Leisure Noise", a gem that arrived in 1999, by which point britpop was already decomposing).

The tracklist opens with "The Chad Who Loved Me", which unfurls a sugary orchestral theme and immediately reveals Draper's nerdy side: even before the rhythm section kicks in, the comparison to the score of "The Spy Who Loved Me", the tenth film in the James Bond series, springs to mind - and not just because of the title. The lyrics, meanwhile, reveal another of the singer's obsessions, religion, which would surface even more overtly on the following album, "Six". The words don't describe a specific scenario, but conjure unpleasant sensations and tie them to the figure of Christ: "And you can't deny, that your shit just tastes as sweet as mine, sweet Jesus". The voice writhes, submerged beneath orchestra and spacey guitars, introducing one of the record's recurring devices: the layering of multiple vocal lines, one warped through filters, the other in falsetto, neither ever fully clear. The voice's mimicry within the surrounding scaffolding turns it almost into an added instrument, and goes a long way toward explaining the timbral variety the production tries to give it throughout the album.

"Mansun's Only Love Song" is another triumph of strings and falsettos, over a backing that this time doesn't shy away from scratching, keyboards, hisses and electronic beats. But it's in the following "Taxloss" that the full complexity of Draper's design comes through. Starting with the lyrics, a manifesto on the exploitation of musicians by major labels, staging a decadent little theatre of puppets and scheming characters ("We think you are stupid, we give you money [...] We'll sell you down the river, just remember that we said we'd deliver you"). The music is a psychedelic ballet that opens by quoting some of the stereotypes of British pop-rock (the beat of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows", the lysergic choruses of the Stones' "Dandelion"), before veering off on a tangent into a pile-up of distortion, programming and electronic disturbance, culminating in a dance coda worthy of a rave. The memorable video for the track showed the band members throwing twenty-five thousand pounds into the air inside Liverpool Street station and filming passers-by's reactions. It was the money the label had given them for the shoot.

After the brief "You... Who Do You Hate?", comes the most famous Mansun song, "Wide Open Space". It's the first track where Draper's voice appears clear and can fully display its dynamism, a space-pop anthem introduced by an acoustic arpeggio that swells as dense vocal harmonies enter (toward the end a quasi-operatic "la la la" even pops up) alongside electric labyrinths. Guitarist Dominic Chad's work is stunning, all muscular rhythmic progressions, sound refractions bouncing from one speaker to the other, and a series of high-pitched riffs that would quickly become his trademark. The lyrics, a moving metaphor for loneliness, follow the protagonist as he loses himself in a cold, unfamiliar space.

"Stripper Vicar", a savage vignette of British humour, tells the story of a priest secretly in love with cross-dressing, using it to skewer the hypocrisy of certain institutions ("I was worried so I went to see the vicar, but before I could confess he first confessed to be a stripper"). While part of the music matches the aggressiveness of the words, with its rowdy, dancefloor-leaning drum pattern and booming guitars, another part seems to pull away, thanks to the melancholy backing vocals and Draper's tragic tone in the chorus. Such a clash of emotions within a single song says a lot about Mansun's evocative powers.

"Disgusting" pushes this game of opposites to the extreme. Structurally it's an acoustic ballad marked by dreamy, delicate vocals, yet the lyrics consist of a string of insults hurled at an unknown figure. The listener is never told the reason for such venom, Draper spews it out with total gratuitousness ("You've been disgraceful, it's so regretful, you're disgusting"), and the track takes on the air of a grotesque comedy given its almost idyllic musical backdrop.

In the dance-rock hybrid "She Makes My Nose Bleed" echoes of Happy Mondays surface, and even if it's not the album's most original track, it's certainly one of its most impactful, both for its winning melody and for the title's pairing with cocaine, a connection many listeners naturally made. Although Draper has always denied that reading, even a line like "Bring her on down from heaven" seems to push in that direction.

"Naked Twister" is a slow, tormented crescendo, while "Egg Shaped Fred" is one of the most infectious moments, with its relentless little chorus and Draper's vocals rawer than ever. But these are merely a starter before the monumental "Dark Mavis", eight minutes of piled-up baroque flourishes and delicacies, weaving together guitars, piano, hand clapping, orchestra and spiritual-style choirs.

The album would seem to end there, but if you let the player run on, a ghost track appears, "An Open Letter To The Lyrical Trainspotter", which is in fact among Mansun's finest moments. Draper begins by describing an androgynous boy who feels out of place in the school environment, then suddenly veers into a self-referential chorus in which he declares that his words aren't meant to carry much weight and shouldn't be taken seriously, casting a huge question mark over the whole album. "The lyrics aren't supposed to mean that much, they're just a vehicle for a lovely voice". After that come a series of quirky, dissonant solos, which carry on until the track fades out.

"Attack Of The Grey Lantern" certainly isn't a record that changed the course of music. Had it never been released, rock would have followed the exact same path. But there would be one fewer masterpiece, because it's rare for an album to marry music this intricate yet catchy with lyrics so meaningful.

To explore the band's ups and downs and the rest of their story - equally worth digging into - we refer you to the profile on the site.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

01/03/2015