You cannot see those in the dark? Martin Schindler does. He knows what it means to carry your own personal hell around with you. What it means to fight every single day for one tiny spark of light in this utter darkness. For more than 20 years he has been waging a war against the abyss in himself. Not with swords and the clamour of battle, though. But through his music. With every new album, with every new piece of music he reconquers a piece of that light he lost so long ago. And even though he knows he will never entirely leave the shadows behind, he urges us on to do the same, never stopping to seek the light at the end of that endless tunnel. "Manifest" is the name of his latest MANTUS opus. And again, the title could not be more fitting to both the world he presents on this record and the sickness around all of us. It's the year of the plague, of deceased dreams and destroyed livelihoods. Ever close to the misfits of society, MANTUS clad our present-day despair, fear and uncertainty in music that could not be more emotionally devastating. Deep melancholy, superseded by bitterness and outright fury, songs like clenched fists, by monuments to persistence, empathy and humaneness. Albeit true to the elegant trademark sound MANTUS stands for, it's these moments that remind of the intense protest culture of the former German Democratic Republic: Songs like anthems for a new time, like swan songs for the old world we have to leave behind in order to be reborn. Massive guitars, nostalgic piano, throbbing drums paint decidedly sombre landscapes onto a bittersweet canvas, infused with Martin Schindler's weltschmerz-heavy voice and his elegiac counterpart Chiara Amberia. Be it an enigmatic goth rock street ballad, defiant smashers with an almost punkish edge or ashen grey hymns to the morbid beauty of urban nightfall: Not two years after the ingenious double strike "Katharsis" / "Pagan Folk Songs" MANTUS return as creative, as inspired as restless as ever - and that, mind you, after ten studio albums in the last decade alone!
