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LP . CD 
Matt says: It was always gonna take some serious guts to fight off Wooden Shjips' and Moon Duo’s annual psychedelic take over; but somehow this year, I think White Manna have done it. Perhaps it’s that we all recognize Ripley’s cuddly face now, but White Manna’s self titled debut (released on Holy Mountain, as was the Shjips first record) instantly struck a darker, heavier, more “balls-out” chord with us here in the shop. These were instant air guitar anthems, and the aggressive, more Stooges-esque vocal delivery would leave us gasping for breath when the songs finished. With riffs as snappy and incessant as this, you've little chance to get lost in dreamworld, rather you're catapulted full-throttle down the Californian highways from which the band hail.
I have to quote the sales notes: "White Manna focus on mantric riffs that accelerate into speed-freak, headbanging frenzies that make you feel indestructible" - you can't really expand on that, but I'll try. Adopting some classic trad-psych arrangements with the speaker melting guitar production of today, White Manna don’t hide behind walls of synthesizers, throwing stones; instead they meet you head-on with a big fuck-off axe - “you want some?” they snarl, drummer and bassist on the wings – the pretenders shy away - and the Manna continue onwards, leaving everyone shaking in their boots. In short, White Manna, for this year at least, are the scariest and fiercest band you can purchase from our dusty racks; and when sharing floor space with White Hills, Wooden Shjips and the plethora of ‘60s-‘90s psych re-issues that we stock, then that, my friends, is saying something.
ABOUT THIS ITEM
White Manna play space rock with a scorched-earth policy, taking their listener on a journey of intensity and intoxication over the course of five gloriously unfurling tracks.
The Arcata, California quartet may telegraph where they’re coming from and where they’re going to take you with their track titles, but knowing the itinerary doesn’t dampen the thrill of their excursion into stellar depths. White Manna know the transcendental and transformative powers of repetition, locking you into their thick hazy grooves, ramping up the intensity of distortion and guitar wig-outs as they explore their own hallucinatory visions. You won’t try to escape.
Opening track “Acid Head” is not false advertising. Opening with an amiable boogie-rock amble before morphing into stentorian, Loop like riffing, you’ll know immediately that you can count on White Manna to envelop your head in the Asheton brothers’ genius string thuggery and convulse you with the primordial throb of the Stooges (and, later, Hawkwind) harnessed, before sonic irony was invented. White Manna group focuses on mantric riffs that accelerate into speed-freak, headbanging frenzies that make you feel indestructible. But on “Don’t Gun Us Down,” White Manna throw a change-up, setting the science-fictional scene with billowing solar winds, before shifting into a mantric cruiser over which a wah-wah-ed guitar articulates a hedonist manifesto—perhaps “fire all of your guns at once and explode into space.”
White Manna won’t dazzle you with eclecticism; instead, they’re monomaniacs who repeatedly win you over with their irrepressible ability to soar out of the mundane and into the unknown, by tried-and-true methods that have been upgraded to modern 21st century specs. Just two notes ridden into eternity is all the fuel these songs need to unravel spaced out vocal lines and searing guitar riffs over the course of lavishly extended jams where time melts completely and a second lasts forever, always bowing out before the comedown.
Far more powerful than any empty chemical trip, White Manna take you on an organically rapturous journey of hypnotic power and psychedelic spiritualism – enveloping, agonizing, beautiful and destructive.
1. Acid Head
2. Keep Your Lantern Burning
3. Mirror Sky
4. Don't Gun Us Down
5. Sweet Jesus
