Mainekk are a Swedish-Danish-Estonian band that formed in 2007 and have released this, their debut album at the end of 2010. The album was recorded in a cottage in Northern Sweden in 2009. The album comprises ten tracks, which are difficult to pin down into any specific musical genre, varying between rock, pop and jazz, with all tracks being wholly instrumental.
‘Intro’ is just that, an opener based around acoustic guitar and some slight wordless vocals. The track which follows, ‘Pudelhjälten Stefan’ is a good solid rock track with a guitar line not a million miles away from either ‘The Batman Theme’, or ‘Riddler’ by The Fall.
‘Esquim’, starts with acoustic guitar, and a percussion line that sounds somewhere between handclaps and various objects being hit, before a melodica is used to bring a wistful air to the proceedings. By this time I was thinking “This is actually quite good”.
Track four; ‘Lameya’ has a much heavier sound with a slightly slow chiming surf style guitar line underpinned by the bass and drums.
‘Gungställning’ which follows was my personal favourite track on the album, featuring a jazz/folk acoustic guitar and stand up bass to provide the perfect café jazz track that was instantly likeable and stood well above everything else on the album.
‘Dis’ is another acoustic track with a slow building, halting melody, although at one minute forty five seconds, finished way before I wanted it to. 'A Call For Batman’ changes the pace a little, being more rock orientated with some echoey, twangy surf guitar over a heavy back beat. 'qpfM’ at fifty seven seconds long is the shortest track on the album, for which I was grateful, being a welter of feedback guitar.
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‘Insight’ has a melody based around a nagging insistent guitar line overlaid with moog synthesiser which is played very much in the style of Prog/psychedelic bands of the 1960s and is a great track.
The closing track, ‘Winehaze’ is the longest track on the album at nine and a half minutes long (on an album that has a total running time of thirty seven minutes), but is the perfect finale to the album very much in the mould of Pink Floyd’s earlier work.
Overall, I quite liked this one, there’s a lot going on in there, the only negative point would be that in demonstrating their versatility, they are pulling in too many different directions meaning that there is a lack of any cohesion to the album, however many of these tracks stand up enough by themselves.
Mainekk on Myspace
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