Album Reviews

- by Tom Dumarey

After the release of a demo back in 2015 and having spent a significant amount of time on the road, Baton Rouge’s Heavy Mantle are now ready to unleash their full-length, ‘Weights & Measures’.

Simply calling them punk rock, doesn’t quite feel right. The twelve songs that make up ‘Weights & Measures’ have holed up in the crawlspace between punk, hardcore and something more swirly à la Small Brown Bike. They sound pretty straight-forward and even melodic one minute in songs like ‘Sleep Escape Artist’ and ‘Filming Cops’ while flaunting their rawer, more frantic side and sounding almost like a hardcore version of Cursive in ‘Four Walls Fallen’ and ‘Goth Brubecke’ the next.

And when I say one minute, I mean one minute. The longest song on the album is ‘Hungry Ghosts,’ which clocking in at a mere 131 second already makes it feel kind of excessive compared to the other songs.

At first glance it seems that ‘Weights & Measures’ will just take 20 minutes out of your day, but it will have you keep coming back for more.

Track listing:

1. Origin & Cause
2. Sleep Escape Artist
3. Four Walls Fallen  
4. Eyes Wide Open  
5. Unanswered Ways
6. Candles
7. Hungry Ghosts
8. Untitled
9. Battle Scars
10. Filming Cops
11. Perfect Souvenir
12. Goth Brubecke