Bong — Mana-Yood-Sushai
It’s a direct reference to The Gods of Pegana by prolific Irish writer Lord Dunsany, the colleague of Williams Butler Yeats who influenced everyone from H.P. Lovecraft to J.R.R. Tolkien to Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin. In the story, Mana-Yood-Sushai is the primary creator and the god of all other gods, who is put to sleep after creating the world and kept there by the incessant drumming of Skarl the Drummer. Upon awakening, Mana-Yood-Sushai will destroy the lesser gods and start all over again, and no man can pray to him for fear of waking him up. The suns and the worlds are all thought to be manifestations of Mana’s dreams, created by the music’s effects on his slumber, and if Skarl’s drumming were to stop, the dreams would end and the worlds would disappear.
Newcastle’s Bong—an indicator for the paraphernalia required to truly process or enjoy this music, which could be a problem for some—play with as much intensity and deliberateness as they can muster, as if the supreme god will wake up and kill them if their playing ever ceases. And these two tracks, one at nearly 30 minutes and the other at 20, sure seem to go on forever.
“Dreams of Mana-Yood-Sushai” at least achieves a meditative quality that fits nicely into the overarching theme of the album. It introduces twin parallel lines of psychedelic guitar, one of sinister swirls and the other a heavier fuzz drone, which mostly noodle around each other, forming a helix of sound that never progresses from the same eight bars repeated ad infinitum: 20 minutes into the track is not much different from 10 minutes in. Sure, there’s a slow-motion rhythm tapped out on cymbal, but it’s a mere spark that never gains enough oxygen to catch fire. And eventually the squalor of a guitar solo fires up out of nowhere, but it stays buried underneath the repetitive din. The track’s biggest surprise is the booming baritone voice that announces Mana-Yood-Sushai, then repeats his name into a mantra for the rest of the piece.
“Trees, Grass and Stones” is immediately more precious, with strums and light touches over a generally ambient, spacious backdrop. This again is deep trance stuff, but for its rough edge could be played in any new age shop. Then the cacophony builds with the same ingredients as before: fuzzy drones, slow cymbal rhythm, and swirling Japanese-sounding flourishes, this time devoid of the transcendental repetition. It is in fact a much more straightforward jam piece, for which this band is known—one that could never be exactly replicated live because it is not based on any kind of composition. The middle settles into a groove that either feels like time has stopped, or that time is being wasted. There’s just not enough variation or activity on the part of the players to justify the exorbitant length of the exercise. It might be best to let the supreme god wake up and start all over.
Mana-Yood-Sushai is Bong’s first album to be properly recorded in a studio by an engineer (Greg Chandler of Esoteric), and this may be its greatest success. Chandler is able to give the band an impressively vast and resonating sound field, where everything is amplified to sound huge but not at the expense of depth or subtlety. Whether one has a bong or not, it is easy to get lost in such a rewarding, detailed mix.