De La Mancha - Atlas (2008) *****

De La Mancha - Atlas (2008) *****

by adi51 ~ Saturday, 20 June 2009

After the excellent ‘Release All Light EP’, De La Mancha arrive with a full-length offering, delivering on that early promise with an album that combines a Sigur Ros-like sense of scale with humbler, shoegazing songwriting values. ‘Release All Light’ still shines brightly from the album’s tracklist, sounding great on an epic scale, but there’s a lot more to Atlas than that: perhaps due to the presence of Dag Rosenqvist (aka Jasper TX) on electronics and guitar, for every moment of tuneful Euro-indie like ‘Lotus Seven’, there’s a more subtle, soundscaped piece like the ambient brass tones of ‘And Rainy Days’, or the introspective, echoing piano chords of ‘Sleep’. If all this sounds suspiciously like some sort of by-the-book post-rock exercise and your tolerance for such things has reached saturation point, fear not: this isn’t really that sort of record at all… despite the presence of gratuitously long, irritating titles like ‘So Let’s Blow Up Our Heads And Leave’, ‘Atlas’ is proof that De La Mancha have an impressively diverse repertoire, comfortably blending musical disciplines, and handling their instruments with a real expertise. Furthermore, the album is all filtered through a great production job from Rosenqvist, who keeps the hour-long duration ticking over with a real sense of dynamism and narrative progression. Lovely.

>Fantastic<

Tracklist:

01. Newfoundland
02. Release All Light
03. Lotus Seven
04. And Rainy Days
05. The Kimono
06. Superstoned
07. So Let's Blow Up Our Heads And Leave
08. Being A Hero Is Easy
09. Sleep

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