Louisiana, Mississippi river, dark tales and weird legends, elevated tombs and stakes to keep the skeletons to the ground when the river rises and flood brings disaster. Spicy foods, voodoo stories and water creatures, the cute alligators, it’s already after dark and you can clearly hear someone walking on withered leaves… Yes, it is there on the south of USA where they set their music base the Athenians Manos Six and the Muddy Devil, a dark duo that first left us speechless as the opening act of Shattered Hope and a few months later they come to finish us off with their debut studio album.

There is no doubt that dark music has many different faces and here on “Swamp Suicide” you will find the one that this band has chosen and this is no other than the combination of dark Americana with death country, a combination that manages to tally nicely with their black evil tales. The arrangement is simple, based on banjo, the percussion and the acoustic bass but the melodies become an addictive habit every time I listen this album. Manos Six (vocals, banjo, percussion) and Stamos Abatis (acoustic bass) are the key players of the band but the album has the necessary variety due to small details here and there, a female choir on one track, a guitar or a harmonica on some others etc

There are ten original compositions that follow the logic of a specific story telling with the music going from gospel elegies to traditional songs (mainly on the lyrics of some of them) so the final result is as dark as it gets without the convenience of sound intensity we usually find on more extreme genres (that require guitar distortion) but hopefully they do it without making the sound an unusual sight even for metalheads. So, this is what you get, some songs about death, a special music proposal that manages (without being original) to get the attention of the listener easily during the 32 minutes of the album’s length and this way to take you to a strange trip through the mud of the dark lands you hear on the lyrics.

The album is out there on digital platforms but FYC Records released the album on tape while in autumn we will also see it on cd format.