Estratexa

They Say...

Review by Stanton Swihart, All Music Guide

Manta Ray is a little bit Velvet Underground, a little bit ambient techno, and a little bit Krautrock, and the band's fourth full-length album sounds like all those elements brought to bear on a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western soundtrack. Or, to make it simpler yet, think of the brooding Estratexa as a sort of Spanish Radiohead in its Kid A phase, but more low-key and less high-strung, and not quite as neurotically vibrant, edgy, and challenging. The album is, nevertheless, full of enticingly atmospheric, lugubrious, claustrophobic, and jittery music, a montage of surly dirges (the haunting electric shower that is "Another Man"), lovely throbbing drones (the title track), and rhythmically cacophonous tone poems (listen to the mesmerizing, pulsing, tribal-infused "Monotonía"), with textures borrowed from Hawaiian music (the heavily reverb-laden "Añada"), heavy metal (the aggressively dirty guitar riffs and pulverizing, overdriven percussion of "Ébola"), and, of course, Latin music. Even further afield, "Ausfahrt" has a beautifully meditative, Native American-like flute melody laid over a mournful theremin. It sounds like ghosts rising out of the desert sand. Occasionally a song will fail to hang together all the way through, is left in limbo, or fails to find its way to a satisfying resolution. In those moments, the album skirts the line between dynamic, enveloping soundscape and less interesting mood piece. Even so, Estratexa is largely the former, a gorgeous canvas of abstract, exploratory avant rock, and it fits in perfectly with Film Guerrero's other releases.