If there’s one band in Perth who like to tread the road less travelled, it’s Mental Powers. They eschew stages in favour of atypical performance spaces. They hand-draw their gig posters and painstakingly craft their album covers one by one – never caring, mind you, to name the record. And all the while, they create sound which inhabits only the very fringes of what might be called pop or rock music, and which in any case renders the use of such terms redundant. So in truth, it was fitting that, in order to acquire their debut longplayer, I had to brave the apocalypse, grinding along anarchic streets on semi-submerged buses, assailed by black-green skies, hemmed in by flailing whips of lightning and pelted by ice-chunks the size of small mammals. We slithered desperately through sodden five o’clock darkness until, upon reaching my album-bearing destination, the sun surged out in smoldering orange and pink.
So I’ve eventually arrived home with the attractive brown-paper-and-paint packaging mostly dry, dimmed the lights, affixed the headphones and set the disc swirling.
But no sooner had I escaped the tempest than I was bombarded with the hailstone-on-tin percussion that announces ‘Contador.’ An eight-note saxophone fanfare pipes purposefully like so many restless car horns, leaps an octave, then vanishes. The hail subsides to a half-tempo drizzle bestrode by repetitious, eastern-scented guitar twang. Before long a dull trickle of vocals is wrung out of a sopping shirt, but sublimates to a steamy howl and rides the throbbing beat into the firmament – higher and stronger, fueled and punctuated by rhythmic pirouettes – then suddenly, a deep clang resounds and the writhing hubub is wrenched into oblivion.
‘Ology’ finds us instead miles below, claustrophobic in some subterranean chamber. Rusted pipes clink, tectonic plates grind like teeth and dark shapes lumber in the gloom. The metallic resonance of the ensuing few minutes is reminiscent of Einstürzende Neubauten at their most ominous and ambient. But the sense of dread and despair is eventually mitigated by a steel-drum pebble-bounce groove, a life-affirming firefly in the dark. About half way through the twelve-minute track a seething do-re-mi bassline joins the firefly on its journey; it drags too heavily behind its beat to feel like a release however, and not until an Apache-esque vocal chant starts up does the track seem to peak.
If ‘Ology’ was underground, third and final track ‘D+D’ is an enraged armadillo’s frantic burrowing towards the fiery centre of the earth. It races feverishly across the record’s most accessible chord progression, melodic but unrelenting, narrated by asphyxiated half-singing and screeching sax. Don’t bother listening to this while you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons, you’ll just freak out. Listen to it whilst driving fast, or tenderizing meat. Inevitably though, the track does mellow somewhat, letting your ears take a breath. And at last, with little warning, it fades to black.
On fourth listen, the album is still entirely enjoyable – but one feels wary of treating the disc as too definitive. It doesn’t seem like a monolithic, standalone, cohesive piece of art. No; you feel almost like a voyeur observing a suspended fragment of time – the frozen immediacy of some killer ideas being pounded out in a room full of creative energy. Mental Powers’ brilliance exists in the moment; in the sparkling chance and contingency of every performance, every tumultuous groove. Without a doubt, you’d do well to acquire this record, but good luck working out where in your collection you ought to file it. In fact, best to just give Mental Powers their own shelf. Remember – the Powers that be do things a little differently round here.
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Visit the Mental Powers Myspace.
Purchase the album from the Badminton Bandit Store.
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