Album Reviews
- by Tom Dumarey
After the release of a demo back in 2015 and having spent a significant amount of time on the road, Baton Rouge’s Heavy Mantle are now ready to unleash their full-length, ‘Weights & Measures’.
Simply calling them punk rock, doesn’t quite feel right. The twelve songs that make up ‘Weights & Measures’ have holed up in the crawlspace between punk, hardcore and something more swirly à la Small Brown Bike. They sound pretty straight-forward and even melodic one minute in songs like ‘Sleep Escape Artist’ and ‘Filming Cops’ while flaunting their rawer, more frantic side and sounding almost like a hardcore version of Cursive in ‘Four Walls Fallen’ and ‘Goth Brubecke’ the next.
And when I say one minute, I mean one minute. The longest song on the album is ‘Hungry Ghosts,’ which clocking in at a mere 131 second already makes it feel kind of excessive compared to the other songs.
At first glance it seems that ‘Weights & Measures’ will just take 20 minutes out of your day, but it will have you keep coming back for more.
Track listing:
- Origin & Cause
- Sleep Escape Artist
- Four Walls Fallen
- Eyes Wide Open
- Unanswered Ways
- Candles
- Hungry Ghosts
- Untitled
- Battle Scars
- Filming Cops
- Perfect Souvenir
- Goth Brubecke
Lacking the talent to actually play in a band, Tom decided he would write about bands instead. Turns out his writing skills are mediocre at best as well.
