Mansun – Attack of the Grey Lantern (1997)

Growing up in Finland in the 90's, the term Britpop was reserved for very few selected bands from the UK and people generally only had knowledge of Oasis, Blur, Suede, Pulp, The Verve and Manic Street Preachers. After I've moved to London, I've realised that the genre was actually huge and included many more bands that didn't really break the popularity barrier back in Finland. One of these bands was Mansun. I heard about the band from my friend, who is a bit older than me and had lived in London for a while. He was outraged that me or the other two people in the conversation had never even heard of the band even though we were really quite knowledgeable about music in general. After this discussion I obviously went to find out what Mansun was all about and I could see that their music could definitely fall into the Britpop category.



I bought the album along with another Mansun album quite quickly after that conversation, because at that time it was still really cheap to buy old 90's CDs online. I probably paid three pounds for those two CDs. Attack of the Grey Lantern turned out to be my favourite album by Mansun. I don't think it's quite as good as the other bands I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Maybe it has chances against The Verve, but not against the others. Manson sounds a bit like a hybrid between 80's Madchester sound and late 90's Britpop. They are using some electronic elements in their music, but majority of the sounds consists of weeping electric guitars. The sound is quite old for today. you can immediately hear that this music comes from the 90's and as such it's not quite as timeless as some other bands from that era.

As we're talking about a 90's band, it's clear that finding music videos is not a problem. I picked the first one from this album that showed up in Youtube. The music video for Wide Open Space is quite conventional music video with the band playing half of the time while the rest has been dedicated to a lonely man walking around town by himself. In the end he turns out to be some sort of demon.

The interesting thing about this album is that the best songs are not in the beginning of the album. The first couple of songs are not that interesting, but then something starts happening. Wide Open Space is probably my favourite song on the album, so it's not a surprise that that one came up in my Youtube search. The backing vocals in this song are great and the electric guitars growl beautifully. Stripper Vicar has a bit of an annoying chorus, but the verses sound great. Disgusting shows some influences from trip-hop scene that had started in Bristol a few years earlier. This song is still more straightforward Britpop, but there's something similar in the sounds and rhythms to bands like Tricky and Massive Attack. Eight and a half minute long Dark Mavis is a great song. It has a dark mood that dominates the whole album, but in this song there's enough room to let the song grow. The closing song An Open Letter to the Lyrical Trainspotter is the clearest example of a Britpop song.

This album would probably mean a lot more to me, had I listened to it when it was new, but now it's just an interesting historical piece of music from one of my favourite musical eras. The more I listen to this album, the more convinced I become that I had made a mistake by not exploring more into Britpop back in the day.

Listen to the album on Spotify.