De La Mancha - Atlas [2008]
After the excellent ‘Release All Light EP’, De La Mancha arrive with a
full-length offering, delivering on that early promise with an album that
combines a Sigur Ros-like sense of scale with humbler, shoegazing songwriting
values. ‘Release All Light’ still shines brightly from the album’s tracklist,
sounding great on an epic scale, but there’s a lot more to Atlas than that:
perhaps due to the presence of Dag Rosenqvist (aka Jasper TX) on electronics and
guitar, for every moment of tuneful Euro-indie like ‘Lotus Seven’, there’s a
more subtle, soundscaped piece like the ambient brass tones of ‘And Rainy Days’,
or the introspective, echoing piano chords of ‘Sleep’. If all this sounds
suspiciously like some sort of by-the-book post-rock exercise and your tolerance
for such things has reached saturation point, fear not: this isn’t really that
sort of record at all… despite the presence of gratuitously long, irritating
titles like ‘So Let’s Blow Up Our Heads And Leave’, ‘Atlas’ is proof that De La
Mancha have an impressively diverse repertoire, comfortably blending musical
disciplines, and handling their instruments with a real expertise. Furthermore,
the album is all filtered through a great production job from Rosenqvist, who
keeps the hour-long duration ticking over with a real sense of dynamism and
narrative progression. Lovely.
ARTiST: De La Mancha
ALBUM: Atlas
BiTRATE: 187kbps avg
QUALiTY: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.97 Final / -V2 –vbr-new / 44.100Khz
LABEL: Crying Bob Records
GENRE: Indie
SiZE: 91.27 megs
PLAYTiME: 1h 03min 44sec total
RiP DATE: 2008-05-31
STORE DATE: 2008-00-00
Track List:
——–
01. Newfoundland 8:57
02. Release All Light 5:08
03. Lotus Seven 7:04
04. And Rainy Days 3:14
05. The Kimono 7:46
06. Superstoned 9:13
07. So Let’s Blow Up Our Heads and Leave 7:39
08. Being a Hero is Easy 11:50
09. Sleep 2:53
