Mansion Early Life

Early Life is the debut album by Oakland foursome Mansion. The guitars—one with strings tuned exclusively to C, another not tuned at all—clang as dissonant, percussive elements, but otherwise Mansion executes songs with surgical precision. At times heaving and leaden, elsewhere emphasizing negative space and dour repetition, Early Life’s left-field severity follows an earlier cassette release. The band—which features players from the defunct post-punk outfit Pang and industrial-techno outlet Cube—is familiar to denizens of Oakland’s shadowy musical enclaves. And yet, Mansion has also appeared at venues such as the Berkeley Art Museum (supporting A Minor Forest), where Brutalist architecture proved a proper analog to the group’s forbidding disposition. Early Life is the first full-length vinyl release on Degenerate, previously a fanzine featuring flexi-discs with regional artists such as Musk, Scraper, and Violence Creeps.