Mantic. Los Angeles-based power trio and prog-rock/metal band. Came across them about 2 years ago. They were looking for a vocalist. Hell, I’m a vocalist, and the profile on the advert seemed promising. There was a link to a YouTube video. Clicked on it.
Few bands have captured my imagination the way Mantic did. Joe DuRoss (guitar), Russell Zazueta (bass), and Russell Welch (drums) had this energy, vibe, and synchronicity that emerges when musicians spend a hell of a lot of time honing their craft --- individually and as a unit. It shined through on the computer screen.
I was floored. These guys were doing exactly what I wanted to be doing as a musician, and they did it so well that my awareness soared into creative mode within seconds.
There were three tracks, and three tracks only, on their page at the time. Still only three. Checked to be sure. And, truth be told, that’s all they need, at the moment. These guys put on a veritable clinic of musicianship.
As I watched them play and let the music flow, images formed alongside lyric ideas. A moment of creativity that I had not experienced for a good while. This is a band I wanted to be a part of, right then and there.
Though I didn’t get the spot, Mantic remains a source of creative energy. Simple as that. Here’s why:
The track I recall hearing first was “Nebula”. It was this tune that got the juices in my brain-pan sloshing about. DuRoss’s opening riff is palm-muted, gentle in some ways, but hits with a force that can’t be denied as it progresses. When Welch and Zazueta join in, they build up a rock-solid groove that triggered the amazing moments of lucidity I was experiencing.
Something woke up in me.
The song title, “Nebula”, got me thinking. See, I had just completed a Lovecraft-themed horror game, a real thought-provoking one. The cosmic horror at the center of the game was the blind idiot god Azathoth. Dwelling at the center of the universe, this insane and amorphous entity oozes and gibbers and dances to demonic piping music.
According to the game’s canon, Azathoth is also sleeping, and has spent Ages dreaming up the entire universe. Fourteen billion plus years of a fever dream. As the song went through its movements, I found myself rewinding to certain phrases and measures and bars. Building a story. A narrative. And I did it all over again.
A madman, locked away in a psychiatric hospital and doomed to never again see life outside its walls, speaks to the listener. Coaxing. Manipulating. This crazed person knows how to open a gate to the Mad God itself. He knows its secret, that its asleep. He knows the Mad God also sees him as it dreams. And so he forms a plot. One that he wants the listener to take part in. This insane man plans to open the gate and approach Azathoth in-person. He wants to wake Azathoth from its æons-long slumber.
And what is it that happens when we humans wake up during a dream?
It ends. Its existence is obliterated in an instant. So it is with the Mad God’s dream --- which would end everything.
And we, the listener, follow along. We go through the gate. We approach Azathoth. The tale had an open ending. Did we succeed? Did we wake Azathoth? We don’t know.
I tied the song’s title to an imaginary dark nebula at the center of the universe. The massive Cold Spots in the universe were also a part of the background story. Those areas of the universe are colder and darker than the space around them and were appendages of Azathoth reaching into our universe. Parts of its mind. I finished writing a few hours later.
And that was just the first track.
I shuddered. Mantic had a grip that would not let go. I clicked on the next one. A track entitled “Leviathan”, and that should be a hint of what comes next.
Welch opens the song with a count-in done on his electric pads --- and it’s a sonar. As if we’re underwater with them and something sets off the sonic-based detection devices. Zazueta leaps into a gritty bass riff. Distorted. It hammers the listener with a certain level of frenzy. A few measures later, and the band is in full. The riff is nothing short of brutal. Not the kind of brutality associated with more extreme music, but in its pacing and urgency. Off-meter time signatures and brilliant instrumentation takes us on another ride.
My brain went along for the journey.
The narrative came into focus fast, again. A US Navy submarine has discovered an anomaly nearby and is ordered to go investigate. The sonar goes off almost immediately. A creature twice the size of a high-voltage electrical pylon --- easily 300 feet or more in length --- swims out of the darkness and charges the sub. The sub is armed with live torpedos, which are not yet in the launch tubes. The captain orders evasive maneuvers and preps the sub for firing at the monstrosity. The creature is fast, though, and it grabs hold of the vessel.
Colossal talons on its meaty hands tear at the hull. Tentacles that should not be on its face wrap around the sub and squeeze. Alarm klaxons blare. The vessel moans in protest.
And then the first bolt in the hull pops out of place, strikes the sub’s floor. The metallic ping causes the bridge crew to pause and stare in horror at one another.
Water rushes into the sub at breakneck speeds. Metallic groans turn to screaming. Human voices crescendo in a collective cry of horror, dismay, and realization. It happens so fast that its mind-boggling.
Death has found them.
The massive creature constricts and tears. Under the onslaught, metal twists and breaks. The underwater pressure finishes the job and crushes the submarine. It goes radio silent. The Leviathan swims away. To continue guarding the massive city lurking under the Pacific Ocean that it is part of. And it is not alone.
And, of course, the Navy, having just lost contact with a vessel, sends another.
“Blood Tendrils”, the newest track Mantic had up, was intentionally the last one I chose to play. I wanted to experience the band’s growth from the first two tracks and see where they were at that time.
My initial plan had already fallen apart as Mantic pulled me into their musical world, though, and I knew I was in for the trek they wanted me on, not the one I had planned for. My hands may have been shaking by that point, but that’s what they’re doing, now, as I revisit these songs.
“Blood Tendrils” opens with a lilting but dirty riff that hints of things to come. A short count-in later, the song takes off. Any song that drops like a roller coaster the way “Blood Tendrils” does is bound to get the listener hooked. That effect was achieved in short order. The lighting in Mantic’s video is a solid red glow. Perfect for the motif of the song.
My imagination, still fired up by the previous tracks, went its own way, again.
Images of a dying person on a hospital gurney formed. As life slips from the body, the lighting in the halls visible to the patient through an open door changes. From fluorescent white to that same blood red in the band’s video. Pulsating tendrils grow along the floor, walls, and ceiling. Putrid flesh replaces drywall. The tiling on the floor spots as blood, bile, and gore drip upon it. The sterile, disinfected smell that permeates hospitals is gone, replaced by the smell of a swamp.
The tendrils fill the doorway and blot out the corridor. The patient, unable to move, stares on as the tendrils make their way throughout the room, encircling the gurney. Equipment in the room rusts, corrodes, collapses. Hardened industrial-strength plastic becomes brittle.
The pulse of a massive heartbeat keeps time with the music as the images continue to form in my awareness. Similar to vines growing along a ceiling, the tendrils creep overhead. The bright white light used to illuminate a patient as a surgeon works darkens. The whole room is flooded with that same red glow.
The music builds upon the riff at the beginning. Lost in its throes, my mind continues to narrate the lone patient’s trip into the unknown. Wisps of blood red drift toward the wide-open eyes of the patient. The red glow intensifies the closer the tendrils get, giving the room a contrast too horrifying to think too long on.
Gentle strands alight on the patient's cheeks. Their touch is maternal, soothing. They caress the patient as they gather. Loving. Tender. Calling the patient to them. Flicking the hair on head and arms and legs. The patient greets the touch, the embrace, lips parted in ecstasy.
The tendrils gather above the patient’s face into a single pulsating thing and slam into the patient’s mouth. Their pulsating becomes a throbbing as they push deeper and deeper. An awful wet crunching fills the room as the patient’s jaw separates, and ligaments and muscles tear and break. Piling into the patient’s maw, the tendrils pump, begin wrapping the body into a cocoon of writhing silk.
The camera in my head pans away as the music fades with the outro. The tendrils of death claim another life, but something new is yet to be formed and birthed from the chrysalis they had formed. We don’t yet know what that may be.
That set of lyrics wrote itself in the same manner as the others.
The music fades to silence. The box fan near me hums. My mind is blown, and it is no less intense than the day it first happened. In fact, it may be more so.
Mantic is on YouTube, and their debut LP is planned for release later this year. They can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/@mantictheband7330/