The last Brand X studio album was made in California with a five-piece line-up, a MIDI vibraphone, samplers and triggered brass. It is the most technology-forward record they made and the lowest-rated of the eight.

The short version

Manifest Destiny was recorded and mixed in February 1996 at Total Access Recording Studios in Redondo Beach, California, and released in 1997 by Outer Music, catalogue OM-1002, in Germany, with distribution by EFA. The band produced it with David Hentschel, who also engineered; Brad Aarons and Joe Privitelli mastered it. It is the largest line-up of the reunion era, and the only Brand X album recorded on the American west coast.

California, samplers and a MIDI vibraphone

Goodsall, Jones and Frank Katz are joined by two new names: Marc Wagnon on MIDI vibraphone, synth percussion and triggered brass, and Franz Pusch on keyboards, samplers and effects — which restores a keyboard player to the band for the first time since 1982. Danny Wilding returns on flute for one track and Ronnie Ciago adds udu, shaker, tam-tam and rainstick to another. David Hentschel is credited as a performer on one piece as well as producing. Pierre Moerlen appears only on the two bonus tracks of this German edition, not on the album proper, which is a distinction worth keeping straight.

The sound

Sampled, vibraphone-tinted fusion. Wagnon’s MIDI vibraphone and Pusch’s samplers give the record a very different palette from anything before it, and the sequencing and triggered parts take it a long way from the live-band feel of the 1970s albums. On the vocal question, the honest answer is a qualified one: the album is very nearly instrumental, but Frank Katz carries a vocal credit and John Goodsall appears as a narrator on one track, so it cannot be called instrumental outright. There are no sung lyrics in the ordinary sense.

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The songs

‘Stellerator’, second on the record, is a Percy Jones composition. ‘The Worst Man’, fifth, is also Jones’s and is the one track carrying Danny Wilding’s flute. ‘Virus’, third, is the piece with Goodsall’s narration and Ronnie Ciago’s percussion on it. The German edition adds two bonus tracks recorded with a different drummer, one of them a fresh performance of a Robin Lumley composition from Moroccan Roll twenty years earlier.

Reception and legacy

On ProgArchives the community average is 2.97 out of 5, the lowest of the eight studio albums and the only one below three. No chart placing, sales figure or professional review has been traced in any territory. Outer Music released it in Germany rather than in Britain or the United States, and only the German pressing has been examined for the credits used here, so other editions may differ in what they list. The band stopped operating again around 1999, and a reunion attempt in 2012 did not produce a record; a further line-up worked between 2016 and 2020 without releasing a studio album, so this remains the last one.

The verdict

Manifest Destiny is the hardest Brand X album to recommend and the most interesting failure among them. The instrumentation is genuinely new, the three Percy Jones pieces are worth hearing, and the bonus performance of a twenty-year-old Lumley tune is a real link between the two versions of the band. Set against Unorthodox Behaviour it sounds thin and processed, and the ratings reflect that. Come to it last, or not at all, and do not let it colour what you think of the seven records in front of it.

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