THE WAY WE ARE-Volume1
Recording studio : AMANITA (Anglet - France)
Recorded by S. Krieger (Shunatao, Daguerre, Voodoo Muzak, Persepolis...)
Mix studio : AMPLI (Billere - Fr)
Mix&Mastering by Pier Belmont ( Magnetix )

It’s been quite a while now that Randy Mandys display the rock within them off the beaten tracks.

First a sarcastic punk trio playing uptight rockers (The Extra Soul Thing), the band, as they became a quartet, started having a craving for soul, cold and folk music, thus blowing the frame of their songs up. Their quest had driven them into the introspective and brutal psycho-rock rollercoaster album The Teenage Fruit, a bombastic gem which considerably widened their musical universe.

With The Way We Are, their boiling-hot new opus, they confirm the trend and the crossroads keep on multiplying.

The band appears even more straightforward than before and alternate glam (The First Rockstar of a New Kind) with new-wave (Hope in New Life Forms, trippy or Cold Inert Mineral with its stiff disco sound) or even rhythm and blues (So Much in Life You’ll Never Get to Know). Indeed, Randy Mandys love revisiting the musical styles they’ve been haunted by for ages so to shape a rock music that matches their time and looks towards the future. Definitely, their retro-futurism should be taken seriously.

On this new album, the lyrics sound like the ones of a band paying attention to their peers.

In the song The Way We Are, the singing goes wordy and utters lines of bitter diatribe as the rhythmical energy makes a good contrast with the pervading darkness. It resignedly evokes the impossible in Revolution, explores the depth of boredom in Silhouette, supported by a mechanical mutant groove. It becomes nearly mute in A Man is Still a Man, a song you cannot call an electronic waltz, a Morriconian revival, a mystical invocation or a noisy wandering, and yet it partakes of all that. In Where Are My Dollars?, the disenchanted monotony of the beginning slowly turns into an anthem which is almost too joyful. As for Pago Mago, it starts as a spaced out and cathartic garage rock, and shifts to a long metallic howling with harsh tortured guitars, it’s a senseless one-way spiral, a surrealistic and smoky delirium… well, it will mesmerize some of the listeners and irritate many. Fair warning.

No pitiful complacency in here, though. Each ingredient in these new songs got through the Randy Mandys filter and sounds as tense and nervous as everything they produced so far. And if the band can afford so much experimentation and exploration of fresh new territories, it’s because they drill their uplifting energy deep into everything they try. In case you need a proof, listen to The Wholling Stoppelizzy Strikes Back, In Your Face, Dammit! , a love song with nothing to do with the enormous amount of cheesy stuff that tarnishes the genre -an anthem to sharing and care fully loaded with clap-claps, tambourines, unforgettable riffs and other things they stole here and there to we-won’t-tell-you-who (but we maybe just did).

Anyway, The Way We Are promises to be a new masterpiece of the Randy Mandys puzzle, an album as obvious in some parts as demanding in some others. For sure, the more you’ll listen to it, the more it gets substantive.

-Regional selection fot Découvertes du Printemps de Bourges 2006 & 2008.
-Price at Bilborock festival (Bilbao) in 2008.
-First in Leioa ' competition in 2009.
-Selected for competition of Villa San Adrian in 2010. (Link)
-Winner of Eurodemo in 2010. (Link)