Manifesto - Manifesto

I had kept an eye open for a physical copy of this one for, oh, I dunno, probably 25 years when I finally found one for $3 on a shelf in the record store my wife grew up visiting on California's Central Coast. I knew Manifesto as the post-punk band led by Mike Hampton (Faith, Embrace, One Last Wish) and backed by longtime collaborator Ivor Hanson (S.O.A., Faith, Embrace) and Bert Queiroz (Youth Brigade, Double-O, Rain). If the tattered edges of my memory still tell the truth, I remember Johnny Riggs talking them up on 'HFS the year I moved to Baltimore, even though a 1993 copyright date on the tray card doesn't quite align with my arrival to Charm City. Regardless, here was an early 90s curiosity, featuring Dischord royalty on a major label, that'd I'd wanted to hear for a very long time.

It...doesn't hold up. On my first listen, my takeaway was, "Who is this for?" I tried to put myself in the shoes of a music listener in 1991/92. This came out on Fire Records the same year as Pulp's "Separations" and Television Personalities' "Closer to God", as well as Eugenius's "Oomalama". There's a sort of cool joy present in all three of those records that doesn't exist here. If I didn't know better, it's like a band decided to make a British-sounding record operating off assumptions of what British audiences would like, without having actually listened to any contemporary British music. Does that make any sense?

I will say that, when Manifesto sounds have come up on shuffle over the past few months, that I like the songs by themselves, removed from the context of a single full-length. So, maybe, in that respect, this is a release far ahead of its time, better suited for addition to a playlist than a CD player. I guess I'm not at all bummed out that I bought this; Lord knows I've spent more money on worse records.

Postscript: It's dawned on me in the space of writing this that I've been mixing Michael Hampton up with his contemporary Mike Fellows (of Rites Of Spring, Miighty Flashlight, Silver Jews), thinking they were the same person, all this time, which may account why this record rattled around my head for so long.

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