They’ve been compared to the MC5 and the Stooges, but while the opening title track on Pan shares base riff genetics with I Wanna Be Your Dog, there’s much more at work here than a retread into the Detroit garages of the past.
For all their fuzz pedal ebullience, there’s something far more cosmic at play, the six lengthy tracks on the album spinning out, twisting and turning into beautiful electric drones and sparks that plunge them into an enveloping psychedelia that will surely endear them to the hipsters at festivals like All Tomorrow’s Parties. The result is intoxicatingly hypnotic.
They’ve said Pan was inspired by the northern Californian landscape, and there is a sense, as album closer E Shra morphs and pulses, blown this way and that on melodic gusts that come out of nowhere, of being at the mercy of the elements, of wildness taking back over.
Here, White Manna have created grown-up lullabies of the most primal kind./o:p
