Mechanimal |

Side-Line

I never heard of the band before, but I can assure you this work had a real huge impact on me. The electronics are minimal-like while the guitar playing moves in between a rather dreamy play and exciting shoegaze passages. The result is a real surprising mix of electronics and new-wave elements plus a few isolated influences. Their sound is a creative exposure of how mixing elements of the past with a modern touch. “Secret Science”, the successor to the debut album “Mechanimal” (2012) is an innovating work featuring revisited new-wave and shoegaze elements, mixed with intelligent electronic treatments.

VICE

A couple of years ago a trio of bearded burlymen calling themselves Mechanimal and describing their music as “drone n’ roll” exploded in the Greek music scene after the release of their eponymous first album. Each track on the record, they said, was a “great portrait of the urban landscapes of the post-modern world and its inherent chaos, nihilism, unfulfilled desires, and the economic decadence surrounding this scenario.” Greece, as you may have heard, has been going through something of a rough patch, and the album resonated with the country’s downtrodden youth. A dedicated fan base materialized in an extremely short period of time, and for the past two years those into Mechanimal’s brand of industro-shoegazing have been eagerly awaiting a follow-up. Recently the band announced that their next album, Secret Science, will be released in October 2014.

Oliver Arditi Blog

Beauty is not found in spite of a bad situation, but in the very tissue of its being, in the experience of living through it; dark, dysphoric atmospheres are evoked, and Mechanimal isolate an aesthetic perspective that emphasises all the power and determination of the human response to them. This is the music of people facing hard choices, not escaping from them; people engaging with situations that they know are unjust, and meeting them with determined realism, not denial or fantasy. The music is organised, coherent, and it is to Mechanimal’s credit that they have found an artistic response to the context in which they find themselves which is not chaotic or viscerally angry. Mechanimal is an intelligent, moving and profoundly powerful album.

Louder Than War

Their sound is fresh and clinically raw, continuous bass throbs and krautrock melodies accompany spoken word lyrics and shoegaze guitars over ten tracks of the very highest quality. The group’s ability to effortlessly move between hard industrial sounds and more poppy electronica ones is superb. There’s something completely gripping about their sound that a UK audience would devour in droves. Mechanimal are exciting and bold and sinister. More importantly they are here, now, and just have released on of the finest albums of the year.