i've seen a way

Album review

Mandy, Indiana's debut album has been a long time coming, some three years after the Mancunian group captured attention with its first singles. Since then, the band's post-punk sound has grown more ominous as the world's political landscape has become divisively darker. "The themes of revolution and a need to stop the rise of fascism are very present in the lyrics," singer Valentine Caulfield has said. Sleazy and slinky, "Pinking Shears" features Caulfield, who sings in her native French, delivering what sounds like a playground chant but is actually extremely bleak: "This shitty world has worn me out ... I no longer want to wake up/ When we let humans die/ In the Mediterranean Sea/ In unheated buildings/ In our countries of big freaks/ When we choose our refugees/ Only blondes are allowed in." "Injury Detail," meanwhile, throbs and kicks out a manic dance floor beat, applying the monotony of video-game action as a way of getting through the day: "Player 1, prepare yourselves ... Up down/ Down, left/ Left right/ Right, up," ad infinitum, Caulfield orders, before declaring: "Finish off your opponent." The band chose to record the album in parts and pieces at unusual locations, from a Bristol shopping mall to a cave in the West Country to Gothic crypts, while splicing in lo-fi field recordings of, for example, a herd of Swiss cows. According to guitarist and producer Scott Fair, "It's about us capturing things happening in a specific place at that moment." "The Driving Rain (18)" opens with the sound of exactly that, a sort of cleansing relief before the song is taken over by needling synth and intermittent sparks of tumbling drums, with Caulfield's vocals layered and layered in AutoTune, like an AI angel chorus with a mind of its own. Caulfield has said that her therapist told her to utilize her anger about the world, which emerges as a brilliant disturbance in "Drag (Crashed)," cataloging shitty things said to and about women, like "I prefer natural girls, but you look tired" and "She's gonna pop some fly buttons/ You're going to need a gun to fend off the boys"—a comment made about the singer when she was just a toddler. She sounds caught behind a metallic wall as she hollers and hisses her words over a siren-guitar skronk and horror-movie screams. "Iron Maiden" is a trudging funeral march punctuated with shocking guitar brightness that builds to a blinding frequency and, low in the background, a wail of anguish. And "Peach Fuzz" comes on like a war whoop, its Centipede-esque video game squiggles chasing the beat; if it were soundtracking a movie, this would be a breaking-point scene, the main character drugged and sweaty, strobe lights illuminating the cartoon grotesquerie of a late-night dance floor. "It's not a revolt, it's a revolution," Caulfield proclaims. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz