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Mannhai: Hellroad caravan

16/03/06 || Statik Majik

The name Mannhai has been familiar to me, but I have to admit that I never heard their music before. Sure, they’ve released a bunch of albums and have received plenty of coverage in the press but still I never had the time nor interest to check them out. Mainly because they’re not a.) death nor b.) black metal. That much I gathered from the few lines I’ve read about them somewhere.

To put a long story short… Well, actually it is a short story… Somehow I got my hands on their latest release ,”Hellroad caravan”, and since I heard that the ex-Amorphis singer does the vocals on this album, I decided to give it a listen. And the album- cover looked cool enough. That means a lot for me, really.

Since I’ve always like Pasi’s vocals, especially the kind he does on Ajattara’s albums, I thought that this could be worth the 40 minutes or so spent with it. And I was right. But I do admit that this album was definitely a surprise to me, as I wouldn’t consider this metal. Well, it’s probably even not supposed to be considered as such. I’m too lazy to check out Mannhai’s site to see how they (or anyone else for that fact) describe their music. I’ll declare it rock-music. Hard rock, heavy rock, whatever-rock. I suppose someone could say it’s even stoner rock, but since I never listened to stoner rock I have no fucken idea what stoner rock is in the first place. Rock is rock, no matter what words you try to sugarcoat it with. Even when it leans to the heavier side of the scale, like “Hellroad caravan” does.

Now that we have the genre defined, you probably realized that there’s no death/black-metal stylish vocals here. This was probably fucken obvious for most of the people, but it wasn’t for me until I heard this album. If I’d have to compare this to Pasi’s previous bands, I’d say some of the stuff he did with Amorphis could be remotely similar to this. Emphasis on the word “remotely”. The thing is, he’s a damn good vocalist and cabable of changing his vocal-style to follow the style of the music. And Mannhai doesn’t play Kingston Wall type of rock with heavier guitars, like Amorphis, nor gloomy slowtempo death-metal, like Ajattara. Nope, this is rock’n roll to the core. So no growls/screams here. It’s all about clean vocals, I say. Although they’re not that “clean”, there’s definitely more “edge” and roughness to the vocals than on the Amorphis-albums.

And the music in general… Hell, even if this isn’t my regular daily cup of tea I have to say that I like this shit to some extent. It’s groovy, not too soft for my taste and most important: it’s well produced and recorded. I’m a sucker for albums with a good production. From time to time I tend to get some Black Sabbath and Spiritual Beggars vibes from this, but I wouldn’t count on that comparison too much if I were you. Like I said, I’m not a regular fan of this kind of music, but since I do listen to Black Sabbath, and sometimes even Spiritual Beggars, those were the closest comparison I could find in my cd-shelf.

-7 /10

Information
Released: 2006
Label: Bull’s Eye Records
Website: www.mannhai.com
Band
Pasi Koskinen: vocals
Ilkka Laaksomaa: guitars
Olli-Pekka Laine: bass
Mikko Pietinen: drums

Tracklist
01. Shellshock
02. Fuzzmaster
03. Spaceball
04. Dambuster
05. Better hate yesterday
06. Back in the red
07. Mojo runner
08. Overdaze
09. Rock in a cradle
10. The hall of the dead

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