“With Frantic Mantis, Shelby Cinca (Frodus/Decahedron) and cohorts Per Stålberg and Håkan Johansson (Division Of Laura Lee) create their own brand of future-perfect punk rock. They’ll incite riotous hardcore that harks back to the DC days of yore on one song, and then turn around and show you a post-apocalyptic electronic dreamscape with the next.” - Bornbackwards.com

That’s it. Two sentences that perfectly capture the idea of what Frantic Mantis stands for. Not only does it find Cinca, the mastermind of spazzcore, joining into a fruitful transcontinental recording project with his Swedish brethren, but finds them together creating and exploring a new subgenre of punk rock. Cinca can always be counted on to offer exciting new genre names and ideas–from the ’spazzcore’ and ‘mechcore’ that characterized Frodus to the ‘cajun-core’ of newer Cassettes*–and Frantic Mantis is no different, as he unleashes ‘data-punk’ on an unsuspecting and unprepared world.

Just what is ‘data-punk,’ you may ask? Well, let’s go back to the press clipping, shall we? “Riotous hardcore” mixed with ‘electronic dreamscapes’. The live instrumentation sound even more like the angular, futurist hardcore of old Frodus then the last Decahedron EP did, with sharp, grinding guitar lines and shouting vocals. Stålberg and Johansson bring something a little different to the table as well, the frantic punk of the Hot Snakes and the fuzzy, economical garage-punk sensibilities of their own Division of Laura Lee. Added to this stinging stew of sweltering punk is Cinca’s newfound fascination with old electronics, and many of the experimental aspects of Data is Not Information are provided courtesy of a Nintendo Gameboy. That’s right folks, think of Frantic Mantis as ‘Frodus meets Metroid’ and you have a pretty accurate description not only of how this sounds but fucking awesome it is.

The futurist punk mixes surprisingly well with the 8-bit bloops and bleeps, a lot more than I honestly would have expected and offers a listening experience quite unlike anything I was prepared for. Although there are several electronic-only instrumental pieces, the two sounds are thankfully not strictly segregated into separate tracks–the 8-bit sound effects and oscillations can be heard filling out the sound of even the guitar-dominated pieces.

For instance, “Data is not Information” features buzzing drones to hold down the low-end as searing garage-punk plays over top, occasionally interrupted by beeps and pings. The song has a false ending: it fades off into pretty ambient tones before unexpectedly blasting back into the chorus full force. Likewise “Economy is the Enemy” starts with the electronic pinging of a dying Apple IIe, before exploding into some of the wildest punk ever. The pinging continues underneath the laser-like guitars before the song dies out completely after 45 seconds and reemerges as a radically different spoken-word piece. As the song continues, the distorted speech is backed by distant, beautifully decaying guitars and high randomly-cutting chords as it laments the false promises of the year 2000.

Really the only downsides to Data is Not Information is that some of the best songs are simply too short, and some of the electronic experiments meander on a bit too long. Other than that, the album suffers from flat sound, with the bass sometimes undetectable, the guitars frequently drowning out the Gameboy manipulations, and the vocals mixed so low as to be sometimes unintelligible. The mastering is also little poor, no matter how loud you turn the album up, parts still sound muddy and indistinguishable. It’s a shame, because with all the layers of sound happening, this is an album that really deserves to be heard closely.

It’s not everyday you find a punk band toying with ambient soundscapes so pretty they’d make Brian Eno weep, like on “There is Only the Moment and that is Where He Prefers to Be.” On the other hand “The Brooding Polychromes of an Almost Unthinkably Advanced Decay” and “Glappkontakt” offer up some droning instrumental soundtracks to blocky adventures on lifeless worlds. They seem suited for a Metroid prequel that never existed and fit the stark emptiness and ancient-future feeling of that game perfectly with their winding, bending anti-melodies, static waves, and harsh modem bleeps.

Frantic Mantis is a strange fulfillment of the call Refused made on The Shape of Punk To Come for a ‘new noise’. Instead of looking forward, Frantic Mantis seems to find newness in looking backwards–a new noise pieced together using faulty, decades-old technology by a band existing after the collapse of western civilization. From their vantage point at the end of time, they’re able to point out all of our mistakes with a damning hindsight, as Cinca does when he screams out “Black is the truth” on the furious album-opener “Creation Sickness”. Not only is Frantic Mantis both radically new and old at the same time, its one of the weirdest and coolest punk rock albums of the year.