Encrypt Manuscript
Census
The Tone Library
By Jose Fritz
This is not the record you think it is. It’s the second attempt in a greater overarching endeavor to be the record you think it is. In the early days of 2007, Encrypt Manuscript sat down with Paul Mahajan to record these tracks. Mahajan did what he always does, what he did even to Scarjo. He made another record that sounds like TV on the Radio. At the end, the raw mixes depressed, discouraged and disappointed the band. Their stages of grief were brief. Rather than struggle through the ashes of bad ideas, bad takes and bad production, Encrypt Manuscript began again; they would re-record from start to finish. An album under the working title of People was buried in a red Addidas shoebox in the backyard of an attractive Long Island brownstone.
I can think of a few other bands that have re-recorded whole albums. Hendrix, Green Day, Simply Red, Exodus, Hanson, Dimmu Borgir… The list is long but its subjects are most often re-recording classic albums. A couple of bands on that list re-recorded lost albums. The worst reason to ever re-record a record is because the first try wasn’t up to snuff. At this time in their career their last EP, Dialogues, was almost four years old and it wasn’t a strong album in the first place. In the interim they’d recorded a single 7-inch, which was not a tolerable state of affairs. They could not be the gudgeon of another egregious, lackluster album from that overrated cock suckers hands. Damn you Paul Mahajan, damn you.
They cancelled their summer tour, spending most of the rest of that year in the basement, and as they later wrote themselves… “Please understand: a dormant volcano is still a volcano.” Alex Newport of At the Drive-In came in to coax them through their grief and back into recording mode. The result is these 11 tracks—a victory parade.
I have no way of knowing what the aborted version of this album was like. But I want so badly to assume that People was all wrong because Census is all right. All the jangly malformed ideas in Dialogues are cut away in this metaphorical infanticide. The spazzy, screamed vocals are more predominant now making for a Soiled Doves or Blood Brothers freneticism. The inevitable comparisons to Coheed and Cambria and the Mars Volta are all completely fair and deserved.
Encrypt Manuscript does not stop there. It’s all too easy to fall into that hole of Long Island mathcore bands. They kept that odd proggy feeling in the changes and breakdowns as it appears in the unexpected stops as much as the jerky, lurching starts. These noisy crushing blows cascade over mathy drums leading to short poppy crescendos. Spoken passages lead down long hallways to exotic and secreted pop hooks.
Their songwriting has come so far, traveled so many leagues it’s as if they had tried this before and learned something in the process.
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