White Manna plays space rock using a scorched-earth policy. The Arcata, California, quartet may telegraph where they’re coming from and where they’re going to take you with their track titles, but knowing the itinerary doesn’t dampen the thrill of their excursion into stellar depths.

Opening track “Acid Head” is not false advertising. It begins with an amiable boogie-rock amble before tumescing into stentorian, Loop-like riffing. You know that you can count on White Manna enveloping your head in the Asheton brothers’ genius string thuggery and convulsing you with the primordial throb harnessed by the Stooges (and, later, Hawkwind), before sonic irony was invented.

For most of White Manna, the group focuses on mantric riffs that accelerate into speed-freak, headbanging frenzies. But on “Don’t Gun Us Down,” they throw a change-up, setting the science-fictional scene with billowing solar winds before shifting into a mantric cruiser over which a wah-wah guitar articulates a hedonist manifesto—something along the lines of “fire all of your guns at once and explode into space.”

White Manna don’t dazzle with eclecticism; instead, they’re monomaniacs with the irrepressible ability to soar out of the mundane and into the unknown via tried-and-true methods upgraded to modern 21st century specs. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.MOJO MAGAZINE

Bleached out, dramatic score to America's wilds. While UK psych acts tend to journey inward in the face of madness, their US peers like to externalize thoughts crammed in their chaotic minds. So Pan, White Manna's fourth studio album in as many years, is a cathartic soundscaping of rugged northern California landscape; in particular of Humboldt Bay, where the five-piece reside, and Manila where they write. Recorded live to tape at San Francisco's Lucky Cat Recording- a real treasure trove filled with tube/ vintage mikes, pre amps, compressors, vintage API 2824 mixing console et al- it's produce by Phil Manley (Trans Am), who keeps everything fuzzy, distorted and in the red. Equal parts Stooges punk, Hawkwind space rock and Kosmiche beat, their tidal wave of noise is dense, intimidating and unforgiving, best exemplified on the title track, and angry, chaotic squall dedicated to the Greek god.

AQUARIUS RECORDS

Review A:

Another blast of transcendent, spaced out, garage psych from these Arcata stoners, and like past records, it's another gloriously drug fueled, FX heavy excursion into the outer reaches of the sonic stratosphere. Pan starts off with a bang, that bang being a heady sprawl of Stooges-y swagger, doused in some serious Hawkwindy-y swirl, a pounding, churning tranced out hypno-rock that never lets up. The vox are buried, a mumbled wasted drawl, psychedelic organs shimmer in the background, multiple guitars tangle into wild serpentine shapes, the songs oozing organically, stretched out into endless zoner jams, occasionally settling into something a little more tranquil, only to explode into action moments later, and once in a while, winding down into something even more drone-y and dirge-like. And while the rock shorthand for Manna was always Stooges + Hawkwind, Pan is maybe the most perfect distillation of those two sides of the band's sonic psyche, maybe their most rocking, but without sacrificing a bit of the seventies style bongsmoke freakouts, in fact, most of the tracks leave the pop realm altogether within minutes of launch, and never look back.

Review B:

Attention all stoners, trippers, rockers, punks, druggies, freaks, hippies, weirdos, and, well, psych and space rock fans, Arcata, California's own White Manna are back with full length number four (not counting the live one on Cardinal Fuzz)! If you've ever heard a White Manna album before, you already know that on Pan they'll be summoning the dense environs of their hometown, with huge walls of meditative psych dirge. And if you've listened to these guys before, you know they have a unique punk edge to them, often getting compared (by us) to the Stooges. On Pan, right off the bat you get back-to-back repetitive rock riffs that build and twist into spacey trips, definitely giving us that Stooges-meets-Hawkwind vibe. The attitude on Pan has definitely gotten meaner, and more aggressive, calling to mind the last release by Sonoran Desert heavies Destruction Unit. They aren't afraid to really let a song really breath, either, getting into some krautrock territory in some tracks, building and grooving into some 10+ minute jams.

Fans of our other favorite psych bands (Heads, Mugstar, White Hills) and the more punk psych bands like the aforementioned Destruction Unit are in for a treat. Far out.

UNCUT MAGAZINE

Few song titles summarize a band's aesthetic duality as neatly- or as entertainingly- as White Manna's "Hexagram of Goo" from 2014. Across three albums, they've channelled mysticism, consciousness altered by drugs and/ or meditation and elemental power of nature (they're big on dunes) via swirling, white noise blizzards, a ruthless motor drive and fuzz caked, garage punk riffage. Now Pan with its rip roaring "Evil" in particular, underlines the fact that this north Californian quintet look to The Stooges and MC5 as keenly as to Hawkwind, The Doors and latterday Lunfish. This is a wild and dirty, devotional trip that peaks with 12 shrieking, delay warped minutes that constitute closer "E Shra".

AQUARIUS RECORDS:

WHITE MANNA Live Frequencies (Cardinal Fuzz)

More heavy duty jammage from these Arcata hard psych space rockers, whose sound is often described as Hawkwind meets the Stooges, and not sure what else we can add cuz that's pretty dang spot on. This new one on UK psych/space label Cardinal Fuzz is a live set from Europe, recorded on tour in 2013, and finds the band unleashing their particular brand of heavy space rocking, all epic druggy sprawls of fuzzed out stoner stomp, and droney motorik fuzz rock drift, woozy, super melodic Sabbath like basslines and some seriously muscular drumming, all wrapped up in squalls of freaky guitar-noise and crunchy, buzzing riffage. The vocals are drawled and echo drenched, and surface throughout, but really, like most bands of their ilk, White Manna are all about the jams, and like their last record, Come Down Safari (originally a picture disc on Valley King, recently reissued on cd by Captcha) the band can jettison 'the song' at any point, and head for the heart of the sun, or the outer reaches of the cosmos, or the depths of some subterranean pit, filling whatever space they end up with oodles of psych freakout ("Acid Head"), but they can just as easily lock into straight up droned out, hard rocking psych pop ("Evil"), or sometimes that above mentioned Sabbathy vibe gets pushed right to the fore, with some super doomy heaviness ("X Ray").

NME:

5 Artists From Liverpool Psych Fest You Should Get To Know

"Californians, White Manna. Much of the edge of their set – which takes places amidst a backdrop of retina-burning ink projections of purples, blues and whites – comes from vocalist and guitarist David Johnson. He uses each loop of their psychedelic reel to whip himself up into a frothing at the mouth frenzy, to the point where his repeated mantras become unhinged howls, raging against the bone-hard space rock of his four band mates. In a recent interview, Johnson revealed he didn’t pick up a guitar until his late 20’s, which partly explains the primal nature of White Manna’s wonderfully swampy sound: on the one hand they’re heading towards the cosmos, but on the other they possess the raw punk nous of seminal garage bands like The MC5 and The Stooges.

Decoder Magazine:

"On sophomore album Dune Worship, White Manna waste no time getting back to business and like an adrenaline shot to the veins, the riff comes quick. Returning to Holy Mountain for the follow-up to their 2012 self-titled debut, White Manna feels right at home with label mates Wooden Shjips on those early exploratory albums, and those who have been following the band for the past 18 months will no doubt be quick to note similarities with Californian dome rockers Carlton Melton — most notably on tracks “Illusion of Illusion” and “Ascension.” Crystallized, multi-layered FX, heavenly passages of fretboard fuckery and an equal measure of slow-dosed, languid prose wind their way through its six tracks with enough substance to satisfy the infinite subdivides of rock ‘n’ roll. Long may this psychedelic juggernaut roll on…"