Manorexia - Dinoflagellate Blooms

Many many years have passed since JG Thirlwell released any new work as Manorexia. This project exploded in a one-two knock out combination of albums: 'Volvox Turbo' and 'The Radiolarian Ooze'. A re-imagining of some of the tracks from these albums was issued last year in the form of 'The Mesopelagic Waters', it gave some tantalizing clues as to where this project was headed but it only gave hints. Now that 'Dinoflagellate Blooms' has been released (and has also been in sole control of my stereo), it is as though the curtain it lurked behind was not really concealing anything but rather giving shape to an ominous, near omnipotent overture. Richly detailed and ornate almost to a fault, this is an album no serious set of ears should be without.

The details: Thirlwell has written, produced and engineered everything on here, including a 5.1 DVD audio version of the entire record for those of you who want to hear the nuances at a sub-atomic level. There are menacing interludes of static, bombast driven cathedrals of superbly mangled melodies and as he's never one to do things by half-measures: generous servings of almost convulsing vocal samples. Manorexia on this new release are the sound of one's mind coming loose at the stem and then beating against the inner wall of the skull demanding to get out. You tell me how it was that such arrangements came from one man's mind and I'll thank you for it because as it stands now, I'm just blown away at how perfectly integrated everything is on 'Dinoflagellate Blooms'. Nothing is placed in any of these tracks accidentally, not even the phone line going dead in the song "Krzystl". All of these snarling currents work towards a common goal: that of totally commandeering your conscious, waking mind.

It gets even wilder once you quit engaging that frontal lobe and let the subconscious take control. At this resolution, a nightmare world presents itself for your inspection. This isn't the serialized film-noire influenced style he's done as Steroid Maximus or with his soundtrack work for the Venture Brothers. Rather, this is low hanging, acrid industrial offal in the air choking the breath out of your lungs. The sort of atmosphere that cannot sustain life and in which, just maybe, new ways of existing might be revealed. One man's nimble, peering flashlight illuminating the jagged, clawing maw of an abyss which has no beginning and no end. Deep deep down in the depths we fall and even if it crushes us completely, the view on the way will have been worth it, I don't think such a beautiful study of the darker regions of the mind has yet been captured by anyone else. This is an absolutely divine meditation on the subsumed instincts which we in civilization have been conditioned to suppress.

For every small gap in the line of synapses, there is a shadow of what waits to become the bridge over which the neurons flow and 'Dinoflagellate Blooms' is the home to these magnificent creatures. A horrific, near pitch black land of perpetual nadir to some, but a luminous light beckoning like a siren's song in the night to me. JG Thirlwell is to be commended for allowing such a stream of subversive creativity to flow through him; this is a much more organically based record but incisive and relentless like a Crocodile's teeth rending and tearing away at the flesh of their victim until the bones are ground to the consistency of shattered glass on a marble floor. Jul 14 2011