Eyeless in Gaza - Mania Sour (2014) CD-Rip

Completed June 2014 and recorded at Hansa Studios, Berlin and at A-Scale Studios, Nuneaton UK, Mania Sour is an album that serves up a different twist on the soundworlds Eyeless in Gaza have inhabited of late – perhaps suggesting new parallels on the abrasive stylings displayed on the band’s early 80’s classic albums Photographs As Memories and Caught In Flux . Offering a glorious blend of uniquely Eyeless type e -guitars & full-on percussion, Mania Sour presents a brash, strident set of distinctively Bates/Becker style songs that snarl n’ soar with passion and bite.

With the core of the album recorded ‘live’ in the studio Mania Sour is overall an electric guitar n’ drums fuelled album, and it’s worth noting that, in terms of it’s subject matter the album is definitely not the jeremiad you might think were you to judge by the title alone. The ‘mania’ here is that of time passing and experience, of appetite and urge, of perseverance/ persistence & determination – a hard-won sense of righteousness at that which must not be allowed to sour.

Addressing inner worlds, inner spaces, delicate and violent possession, sharpened perceptions, and, significantly, the cry of the eternal – the ‘first songs’ of the will and how they find voice in the world – the long-serving Eyeless in Gaza duo of Martyn Bates and Peter Becker celebrate all of this, kicking hell out of guitars and drums on Mania Sour along the way while also offering glimpses of the madness of joy and the ways in which all of us increasingly find that it is only you that can save your own life – and that :
“If we are everywhere complicit, we are also everywhere active….”.