Music Box | Manual

Mike Newmark Columnist

Manual
Lost Days, Open Skies and Streaming Tides
[Darla]

The music of Manual (26-year-old Jonas Munk from Odense, Denmark) is by now instantly recognizable. Skittering clicks for beats, processed electric guitar strums, emotive synth washes and a new-agey use of echo—if you walk into a room and hear this stuff, you’ll know who it is in a heartbeat, assuming you keep abreast of your lap-top. It’s a sound that fits almost too snugly into the Morr Music and Darla Records aesthetic (two labels he’s recorded for), though except for Ulrich Schnauss, no artist comes close to copying Manual’s approach. And he’s prolific, too: six albums in as many years, all of them sounding like a pixilated Slowdive on a tropical beach at sunrise. With the exception of his debut LP, Until Tomorrow, every single record that Munk has released as Manual has a palm tree on it.

Lost Days, Open Skies and Streaming Tides gathers up all of the stray unreleased tracks and non-album singles in Manual’s catalogue, but rather than provide a glimpse into a different facet of his career, this double album demonstrates how closely Manual has stuck to a particular sound over a long period of time. It’s a bit dispiriting because, according to the liner notes, several of these songs come from interesting sources: “Blue Skied an’ Clear” and “Summer Haze” were pulled from a Slowdive tribute album (Blue Skied an’ Clear), “The River” was written for a limited-edition vinyl that never happened due to financial reasons and “Into the Blue” was a theme for a Danish radio program. But except for a few vocal tracks and a couple of ambient pieces, finding differences between these songs and Manual A-sides is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, even with nearly two hours of music in tow.

Because of this, it may be a better use of space to discuss Manual’s career as a whole, rather than this particular collection. We’ll start with the good things: Munk recorded Until Tomorrow before he was old enough to drink (in America, at least), and released the benchmark Ascend at 21. Its hazy, sun-steeped visions of Tropicalia far outstripped his young age; it was mature music, like something written by an awestruck émigré to Tahiti just before returning home. Of course, his material is lovely—all of it—and when it comes to exotic yet emotive glitch-pop, Manual has a corner on the market. The downside is that it’s criminally homogeneous, easily turning into Manual mush; a third of the way through Lost Days, I had to stop the player just to give my ears a break. And it doesn’t have the transportive power of, say, Gas. If you’re not sitting in a tropical paradise at daybreak, Manual won’t necessarily take you there.

Part of the problem is that these songs tread an awkward middle ground between pop music’s beat-defined structure and ambient music’s propensity for stasis and epic running times. “Blue Shibuya Dream”—which could be played during the final scene of the saddest O.C. episode ever aired, and is actually one of the better songs here—masquerades as a pop tune but doesn’t progress enough to justify its five-and-a-half-minute length. Traditional-sounding female vocals (not normally employed by Manual) on “A Real America” and the Nick Drake cover “Black Eyed Dog” just sit there like another filename on Munk’s computer, sinking into the mélange as though they didn’t exist. Lost Days has exactly one curveball: “Crockett’s Theme,” a cover of an early Miami Vice theme that evokes a 1980s hell and provides the album with its only god-awful moment. Everything else is more palatable yet much less memorable, and for the briefest of moments I’m not sure if that’s what I would prefer.

Most irritating is how, for no apparent reason, Manual plunked the collection’s crowning moment into the penultimate space. I already had “Dizzy Sun” from the Darla Records compilation Little Darla Has a Treat for You, Vol. 24, but I didn’t realize how magical it was until I heard it in the context of Manual’s blander excursions. It’s completely ambient—no beats, no acoustic anything, no vocals save for the wordless, angelic kind—and it swirls in the way songs do when the distinction between instruments not only becomes inaudible but completely ceases to matter. It’s the stuff of heaven, rivaling Eluvium in its blissed-out, dreamy perfection. Here, Manual composed a beautiful song and gave it plenty of room to breathe; elsewhere, he composed beautiful songs and didn’t. Suffice it to say that Lost Days will appeal mostly to completists, genre diehards, and anyone willing to take it in smaller doses than I did in order to write this review.