The Mantles | Piece By Piece

Oakland based indie pop band The Mantles have a sweet yet gritty sound seemingly dedicated to both 1960’s garage rock and Paisley Underground. Jemayel Khawaja spoke with front man Michael Olivares and bassist Matt Roberts (with a cameo from drummer Virginia Weatherby) on behalf of ION about the perils of partying in their thirties, unlikely touring habits and their evolving sound.

There’s a timeless quality to a lot of Slumberland Records bands that renders listening to them as comforting as pulling on your Grandpa’s sweater during a Canadian winter. The Mantles, in keeping with this, have shed some of the raucous energy evident on their 2010 release Pink Information (Mexican Summer) for a more twee sound on their label debut Long Enough to Leave and their sound is reaping the benefits. Already a "grown up" band, they’ve slowed things down a slight and brought their musicianship a little further up in the mix, as if to show to the world that they’ve developed a subtle confidence in their performance as they lope a path through a catalogue of jangly, raw, and mildly psychedelic guitar pop. 

There’s definitely a dark, if not outright subversive, streak through a lot of our songs,” asserts front man Michael Olivares, “I think there’s also a lot of hope.” This is in keeping with tradition. The style they play traces back to The Velvet Underground, and, despite a few stops on the way in Los Angeles, Scotland and New Zealand, has found a modern home at Oakland based Slumberland Records. “We knew for a while this was gonna be on Slumberland...with that in mind we weren’t trying to shape anything for that demographic,” explains bassist Matt Roberts. Olivares adds, “It was a long process. The [Pink Information] EP was a little more punk-ish. I think we have gone through being more thrashed out. This stuff came out more melodic, but I think it was kind of unconscious.”

In addition to easing up on the riffage, the band nurtured a deliberate touch by allowing the album to develop at a natural pace. Roberts recalls, “On the first record, when I joined the band, I didn’t know, for a year or more, Michael was singing these songs that we were playing and mouthing words that didn’t exist, just making nonsense syllables. I never even knew that. It was really convincing. He hasn’t done that in a long time. It seems like now the songs are really well formed before we record them or play them out.”

Spotting a Mantle on tour is a rare find. Despite an East Coast jaunt opening for Ty Segall, the band rarely undertakes any long tours. And when they are on the road, their flirtations with excess are short lived, neigh on non-existent. “We enjoy eating food at different places, regional foods, and just seeing different places and watching late night motel TV,” explains Olivares. Roberts is a little more exuberant, “There’s a lot of ‘tonight, we’re going to take it easy.’ We’re all in our thirties and we don’t really tour that much...in between, you forget and party it up a little bit and, like, ‘oh yeah, I’m in my thirties sleeping on a linoleum floor with no pillow...I can’t really do this anymore’...And then you just do it again.”

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The Mantles existence has been a lengthy process undertaken at a leisurely pace. This is, it seems, mostly by design. In Roberts’ words, “I think about other bands that have been around a long time and have sort of a cult following but aren’t really striving to try and make it big. There’s no timeline on it. I’ve always found that sort of inspiring.” Therein lies a quintessential aspect of their appeal. The Mantles’ lack of heady ambition matches the tone, pace, and attitude with which garage pop was originally enjoyed. It lacks the desperation-tinged immediacy of so much of the music released in our digital generation. Yeah, The Mantles play pop, but it’s not saccharine, it’s an introspective take on a well-trod set of influences that have been quietly celebrating themselves for almost 50 years. The beauty of The Mantles’ music lies in the nuances and idiosyncrasies that become most evident in the comfort of repeat listens. 

They’ve been steadily treading their own path for almost a decade while the cultural climate churns and recycles around them. “There’s a panic now,” explains Roberts, “Things move so fast, so quick that people think, ‘Well, if this doesn’t happen right now, we gotta give up.’ We definitely have lulls where bad things happen and we get a little dejected, but then, y’know, it just takes one guy who comes up to you at a show and says ‘I have every single record. I’m a huge fan’ and then you get excited again.”

In many ways, they seem a band suspended in time, as if they’re just a highly refined version of the same bunch of lovable weirdos that began to gather in the mid nineties. In Olivares’ words, “I met Virginia [Weatherby, drums] because I worked at a record store at Berkeley when I was a student there. She was this young, quiet, kinda nerdy music fan that would come in. She was into really cool music, but, y’know, she was in high school and all kinda mixed up. She was into sixties mod stuff and it was during the Brit pop explosion...I just kind of teased her for being into Kula Shaker and Ocean Colour Scene and it stuck.” As if on a cue the sound of Virginia’s voice manifests for the first time on the other line. “That’s a lie!” she implores, “I was never into those bands! Oasis and Blur, maybe, but not them.” She had just arrived home to find her band mate and husband dusting off the tried-and-true jibe and grabbed the phone out of his hands to clear her name. Unfortunately, it was a little too late. 

Long Enough to Leave is out now on Slumberland Records.