by Thornswrath
So for the first track )God Bless( I found myself being slowly drawn in with the help of a nicely electroplated trumpet, but midway through the second song )After You Comes The Flood( I was clutching onto my headphones like The Joker gone mad (so I wouldn't headbang them off) and actually ended up laughing and crying at the same time throughout the last half of the song.
As for the third song )Breathe( I was really hearing it for the first time (despite having listened to it recently when it dropped online) as it widens out into a well-placed percussion and then blossoms into the expansive, cinematic soundscape we've become so intimately familiar with over the past twenty years. Nevermind that it sounds like Nico singing at The Roadhouse in Twin Peaks. Once you're lowered into the song itself, you drown in its sound until you have been consumed. The fourth song )Nowhere Now Here( kicks into higher gear at the three and a half minute mark, and by this point in the album, which isn't very far yet considering the ten tracks, it's perfectly clear to me that what I'm hearing truly marks the next level for this band, and what a glorious sound it is.
Playing with more confidence than ever in their interwoven melodies building into majestic crescendoes, the new drummer really knows how to keep the foundation moving relentlessly forward, carrying the bulwark of their masthead like a ship plowing through storm waters. Taka's guitar soloing in this song )After You Comes The Flood( around the six minute mark and onward reveals the hyper-depths of emotional expression he's attained, as if only travel through wormholes in spacetime could've gotten him this far, and believe me that's exactly what this guitarist's progression has been, across the rippling tides of the years.
To call this album anything less than a triumph (even at this early stage of the album) is really telling: it reveals an ear somehow not paying attention, because I know its not just me. It's the thousands of people who have witnessed with their own ears and eyes the spectacular symphonic madness of mono putting on a live show. There's never been anything quite like it in my experience, and my judgment lies along the parameters and high bar of live concert expectations as set by such bands as Pink Floyd and King Crimson (it doesn't get any better than that)—but seeing mono play out a set in a small enough club—and you are suddenly part of a relatively small gathering of human beings being propelled along a hyperbeam for a transdimensional ride in a space ship.
Oh my god this next track is exquisite...)Far and Further(...farther pulling the listener inward, deeper into the subatomic structure at the heart of this album. Tickets will go on sale (for them to perform live here in my city in June) in just two days, they are fifteen dollars each, so I am going to get four tickets right off the bat, if I can. That at least covers my wife and two extra people I could sell or give them to. Mono live is too extraordinarily special and there are some friends of mine here that still need to see them.
Now on to track six—)Sorrow(—quite the evocative title, conjuring immediately recollections of The Mccoy's original 1965 song, Bowie's cover of it on Pinups, and the Pink Floyd track from A Momentary Lapse of Reason, which incidentally represents another peak of Floyd's concert-performing career, in that it involved, among other highly talented musicians, Tony Levin on the bass replacing Roger Waters; now if that doesn't take the top shelf, I don't know what does. I mention this odd tangential segue because it helps bridge the span between these bands. In other words, Japan's mono belongs in the same sentence as King Crimson and Pink Floyd, only they've taken their single-minded devotion toward progressing their post-rock movement (begun twenty years ago on John Zorn's label, with their auspicious 1999 debut Under the Pipal Tree) to celestial heights and infernal depths the aforementioned bands are clearly unequipped to match.
As for where this Japanese post-rock quartet find themselves today, newly-minted with the first replaced member in twenty years (the drummer), they can now be heard flowering out into a much more intricate and complicated sound on the new album, with a deadly reassurance toward paying extra-special attention at optimizing instrumental musical accompaniment. The use of horns and strings can really be heard as a resurgence of vitality on these songs. As far as I'm concerned right now six minutes into Sorrow, this album goes far beyond a mere epic we may have imagined, and crosses over into new unexplored territory with all the abandon of an army of stampeding horses.
I've loved what this band has done live and in the studio since I was first blown completely away during their live show downtown, I think it was at Club Sound (in Salt Lake City), in the back corner behind In The Venue—(which was known as Bricks at the time)—this must've been thirteen years ago. I've seen them six times already, so this coming summer will make that seven. All good monkeys go to heaven.
The seventh song, )Parting(, with its bright uptempo piano loop, seems to evoke a machine-like, wind-up ballerina doll spinning and describing the motions of a grandeur it knows can never be fully articulated or achieved, because it's self aware as an artificial intelligence. The final minute slows down to a more stately understanding and acceptance of this.
Eighth track. )Meet Us Where The Night Ends(, a nine-minute journey that begins creepily enough with sinister sounds bubbling up from under the surface—not to mention the implications in the title—and we're quickly brought into a roiling, close-up descending view of a seething cloudscape of haunted spirits chirping and sighing under the electromagnetic wavelengths shuddering beneath and throughout. The tricky interchange of delays in the guitar riffs blend beautifully with the cymbals and developing backbeat, until the drummer brings in the next shifting of the gears without letting the two guitarists and bassist miss a beat as they climb ever upward together. At four minutes the tension's been building long enough to let us know there warrants a sudden explosion, but you can never tell exactly when it's going to hit as it builds for another minute and has reached another plateau of incredibly cohesive rollicking music. This can already be discerned as a new favorite mono song and it's now that I realize, Wow, coinciding with the Super Blood Wolf Moon, this album's a beast let out of its cage to soar up and throw a shadow over the whole world. Toward the end of the song the surprise comes—that there was no sudden jolting moment—but rather, an incredibly dedicated and tumultuous intensifying until a satisfactory and searing ending has been reached.
The penultimate track...)Funeral Song(...sounds very much like the opening track, God Bless. Maybe it's a reprise. It's three minutes and twenty seconds, and does sound like a kind of funeral trumpet song. There could be a connection between the beginning and this precursor toward a final dissolution. The song breathes into silence toward quieting down for the final track. I'm already beginning to sense an Alpha/Omega theme at work, here.
)Vanishing, Vanishing Maybe(—Here we are, folks—listening to the final song on the tenth mono album, which appears on our radar in the Year of the Replicant, 2019. It could even be our time to die. Who knows. That's the intensity of spirit the music of mono conjures. Equivalent to our confrontations with mortality. Mirroring with melody the yearning sensation of being alive. Embracing the gratefulness to be allowed this spectacle. Transitioning together in a stately procession toward the end of our lives. This music is the soundtrack to my personal evolution as a human being. Vanishing, Vanishing Maybe. The uncertainty of one's own unraveling from existence whispers the promise of a new day to come. With just a couple of minutes left, the music begins its descent.
The final minute, as the music dwindles into the lowest threshold, quieting down in its evocative revery, I am left feeling as if I've just listened to possibly the greatest album this band has ever released. This review was written while I uploaded each song from Nowhere, Now Here from my harddrive into my iTunes library. I'd already listened to it on vinyl but this time I was wholly there for the album. This may sound counter-intuitive to us vinyl junkies. But the fact remains, listening to records in a home family environment does not always add up to the most optimal listening experience. Thank god for my Symphonized wooden hi-fidelity headphones my wife got me last Christmas. Nowhere, Now Here is every bit as masterful as you'd expect a band in this position to be. Only a very careful listen will reveal that it's even more spectacular than that. With this recording, mono have pole-vaulted over nearly everyone onto a direct center movie stage of the mind, comprised entirely of pure instrumental music. That's something that doesn't come walking down from around the block that often. If you want to go on an out-of-body music listening experience, bring earplugs or whatever and try to go out of your way to catch Japan's mono live and in concert. It's something almost more than music—to enter into a realm beyond that which a time-machine could transport you to—and more like the opening of a hyperdimensional portal into the human heart.
This was written during my first listen. It will take me many more listens, in the company of no one but my solitary self, with headphones, to finish piecing together the interwoven threads of meaning inherent to all the songs under the banner of its title. My mind's still rushing from the evaporating avalanche of sound it was just exposed to. It will take some time for more images to emerge in crystal clarity. I feel like I've just listened to an important next step in the developing evolution of progressive rock music. Oh wait—it's because I just have. ★★★★★ five stars
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