review by Shaun Lawton of the last four songs listened to the digital rip on headphones:
-so I heard sides A and B on the record player and am now listening to the fifth track Innocence on headphones on my iTunes. There's a stately elegance to the drumming that I like. It hammers out a nice platform for Taka, Tamaki and Yoda to do their thing, which is somehow bring the listener into the vortex of their maelstrom with the same instant connection to oblivion - or supercharged by a cosmic ballast - whatever you wanna call it - however you want to think of it - that they started with twenty years ago and which displays this band as currently still being the real deal, considering their mostly instrumental overtures having gone through the sonic ringer, amplified through Marshall stacks, on tour for over two decades now - listening to this new album reminds me that this band - will bring the fury.
The Auguries begins. Now, we bend forward and gallop deeper into the forest shadows. Our journey improves with a headstart into the woods late at night under the scudding clouds where the moon is bright. Get a load of that album cover art, of the Earth and moon leaning in for a kiss, against a starry backdrop is purity embodied. At the 2:50 mark and am totally grooving to the steady buildup and soaring guitar highlights with a killer bassline with drums snapping back, what the hell am I listening to --4:10 -- swoooosh no more review -- //swept away
Circuitry lights in trapezoidal patterns glimmer and dim when I close my eyes listening to this. It's as if sonic cathedral windows are shattering from an invasion of a tsunami of rainbows. The music is so powerful or I should say it has such force the mind gets carried off one way or the other. You can go inward or explore the direction you may consider outward and for all you know that's going inward in the opposite direction. At the Seven min mark we glide into a landing. Now it feels as if listener has been stranded on the Moon.
Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand. I noticed the Blake couplet in the last couple of songs here when looking over the gatefold LP. These various details of song titles and cover art merge in my mind to form a less abstract design. We already had Heaven in a Wildflower on track three. To See a World is the name of the fourth track. Now we are descending into a sort of bioluminescent nocturnal underground world where insects buzz in and out of the fungal varieties glowing and spiraling in the dark. Is that a Glockenspiel chiming. After three minutes the band arrives, welcome in this beautiful yet somehow lost and desolate place we've been left stranded in again. See, that's what happens when you surrender yourself to each Mono song. You're taken on a journey and left stranded on some far off alien shore.
But it's always right here and now on Earth that you find yourself, whether listening to Mono or not. And that's when the beauty of their music reaches in deeper and begins playing my rib cage bones like they were a xylophone. My hair begins to stand up on end itself in the static electricity their music generates. Nowhere is this more true than when experiencing them perform live, of course, but hearing their studio recordings especially on headphones lends the sense of intimacy necessary to really appreciate these songs. I know this penultimate track is a twelve minute song, and as it builds and flowers into its seventh minute, there's a dreamlike quality to the sound of this music which captures, at once, the bedrock of ancient spirit in its present living connection with the blinding potential of our brightest future. I don't need to open my eyes now to see I'm listening to an album that is so damn good it doesn't even matter anymore what anyone thinks or says or does this here describes in an overwhelming sense the paradise on Earth we could achieve if only we focused on our dream.
This song is a colossal howler that drives to a tremendous ending.
And Eternity in an Hour. the final track on this, their eleventh studio outing, I can say I need to go now. This is the walk in the garden past the silver witching hour deep into the well of dusk you go on long after midnight limned by moonlight under the stars above. The hidden corner of that secret garden only you and a few loved ones know. The place we all wander to when there's no other place to go. Sitting hunched down on a stump in solitude with your shadow. Those feelings and more welled up in me as this final track opened its petals one by one in easy going piano notes that wind up distilled into a final farewell.
My impressions of the album. The uncrowned kings rule supreme with an astonishing crystal clear statement in Pilgrimage of the Soul. Look, we can't keep measuring things with the old yardsticks anymore. This is the perfect example. Some might say, if this band's twenty year history lay back in the day, that they're climbing toward a second peak, or something (considering their symphonic fifth album, Hymn to the Immortal Wind, coinciding with their tenth anniversary live performance in Manhattan with a 23 piece orchestra and everything. That's certainly in my Top Whatever shows because its damn near #1. But that's another matter altogether. I digress.) while I sit back (or stand back, at their live shows, to which I've already secured my tix for next spring) and observe this band only now hitting their peak. I mean, is it me, or is the 'peak Mono' upon us now-? Sure, there will be purists that maintain 'peak Mono' to be but a tiresome redundancy, and I agree. Some bands, lets face it, are sort of locked into 'homerun mode' when it comes to both releasing studio albums and touring the world performing them live before fanatic or otherwise entranced audiences. Mono is one of those bands. I have everything this band ever put out on vinyl, some of it signed on multiple occasions. I can't even believe they have ten albums. It's been quite a dizzying ride - seeing them live - ever since that time with Pelican at Bricks or In the Venue, whichever it was at the time. Same place I saw Deadboy and the Elephant Men and Wolfmother and Weedeater and Steven Wilson and Fear Factory and Slipknot and Slayer and too many others to count. As for bands locked into homerun mode there's a ton of 'em. Lot of incredible live music out there. When you're at a Mono concert, you're suddenly in a different situation. You will be moved by the music. The question remains. Can you withstand it? Entranced, you will have no choice.
As for this eleventh studio album - damn. I'm so glad I preordered immediately, as I did with their penultimate release, the 3LP live record Beyond the Past. I got a translucent vinyl streaked with lucent silver or something for that, I suspect from the first batch of pressings. My Pilgrimage is orange vinyl which makes me wonder if I got the first run or a subsequent color. Will have to go to Discogs to see.
How many stars are there in the damn sky? That's how many I give this album. It's out of this world.
to be cont.
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