Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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Continuing the small trickle of releases since God's Money, this EP demonstrates the diversity of Gang Gang Dance's sound, even though most of the constituent songs aren't among the band's best.
"Nikoman" has been kicking around in Gang Gang Dance's live repertoire for quite a while. Its Arabic keyboard scales, labyrinthine drumming, and dreamy breakdown are little too familiar to elicit surprise nowadays, but there is more urgency in the delivery. Singer Lizi Bougatsos chants the chorus in a Grime patois poles apart from her normal high pitched cooing. Normally, I would be suspicious of her intentions, but Gang Gang Dance avoids the minstrelsy common when white hipsters appropriate hip-hop culture. They have recently recorded a collaboration with MC Tinchy Stryder, so credit is due to them for actually engaging the rap community instead of just caricaturing it.
The instrumental "Oxygen Riddim Demo" is pleasant enough, but lacks the heft I expect from the band (no small feat considering they don't have a bass player). Nonetheless, the song serves as a good interlude and doesn't descend into the outright obnoxiousness some of the filler tracks had on earlier releases. The drum programming lacks a persistent low end, focusing attention on the interplay between guitar and keys. Alone, they can't fill out the arrangement completely, but given some heavy bass and a bit of vocals it could be a real club banger.
The closing track, "The Earthquake that Frees Prisoners," is an elegy to GGD's late bandmate Nathan Maddox, who was killed by lightning in 2002. Through archived recordings, he lends his voice in a monologue about visions he received on visiting Cairo, the Sphinx, and the Great Pyramids. Languid synthesizer washes and Bougatsos's sensuous vocals begin the track with an uneasy calm, abruptly broken by piercing screams and pounding, reverb-swamped drums . The tempo accelerates as flute samples and pulsing electronics lurch in and out of the mix. Maddox's musings become more agitated and surreal, fracturing into component syllables that skip and stutter under a digital knife. The track exudes a stoned paranoia as engaging as it is unsettling.
This is the first album from Wang Changcun, who is a member of the China Sound Unit, a group dedicated to investigating aural phenomena in various urban centers. Blurring the distinction between noise and the avant-garde, it also marks the first release of a Chinese composer by a Western label with international scope.
Of the two tracks on this disc, of more interest is the lengthy opener "Grand Hotel." In this 40-minute composition, Changcun relies on expansive texture to create an ever-shifting landscape. Opening with what could be recycled fragments of broken glass with swelling pitches swimming underneath, before long this gives way to a more mechanical-sounding hum accompanied by rising pitches. After a fade out and then a fade back in, a reptilian undertone fights various effects with whirrs and beeps. More waves of buzzing machinery linger before retreating, and it’s not unlike wandering through a sonic rainstorm, occasionally ducking for cover and at other times making a run for it. Halfway through the piece, a helicopter hovers overhead, yet its motive is unclear. Perhaps it’s a search party looking to rescue wanderers from the storm, or else belonging to some nefarious law enforcement group. Eventually the clouds fade and the sounds drip into puddles. The tranquility is soon shattered when a swarm of insects descends, in turn fed upon by bats that swoop through their repellent mists. Toward the end, the helicopter returns, but this time something is wrong as it groans and stutters, misfires, and for the first time the song comes close to having something like beats. All that’s left at the end is a minimalistic rippling rhythm, with none of the atmospheric noise that permeates the rest of the song. It’s a fine piece, if not terribly different from others like it, but certainly enjoyable.
A little more puzzling is the second song, "King of Image 1995," which is a field recording Changcun taped from a VHS cassette of a man’s funeral attended by singing nuns. As much as I like the music, I’m a little confused as to its inclusion here since Changcun’s manipulations of the source are quite subtle. It might be a little more effective in a different, perhaps documentary, context. Yet as a window into these lives, the track isn’t without its merits.
This album may not be groundbreaking, but it certainly highlights the fact that there is a lot of underground Chinese music yet to be exposed to Western listeners. If Changcun’s work is any indication of its quality, then I’m all ears.
The composer Daniel Smutny has dropped his first name for his debut album. Despite his avant garde leanings, Telehors is accessible and devoid of any scholastic tendencies. It is a nice album made up of abstract sounds and haunting melodies. It can get dull at times but overall Telehors is a highly enjoyable experience.
Once I got past the awful sleeve (which looks like it was designed for a school project rather than for an album) and pretentious titles I found Telehors to be full of interesting sounds and textures. Smutny has a knack of hiding sounds in the mix that only become apparent when he wants them to. He combines strong synth patterns with all sorts of recordings, some processed and some left natural. Rather than relying on programmed beats all the time, he uses real percussion to liven up the sound. There’s a strong emphasis on environmental sounds like sticks hitting off each other, gentle knocking and little snippets of nature. His use of electronics complements these organic sounds well; the electronics are fluid, seamless and got bucketfuls of warmth.
One of the better parts of the album comes early with “Archpealago,” which is based around a short loop of sampled music. Smutny then uses samples of water, soft static and what sounds like bowed cymbals in addition to his synths to make an elegant and rich piece of music. Everything is used sparingly which allows the various sounds to have their moment in the sun. Later on “Replay” and “Rayse” also stand out. The former is very smooth sounding and again has a very spacious feeling to it, allowing the different elements to breath. One thing I hate with this sort of music is clutter and Smutny avoids it completely. “Rayse” isn’t cluttered but it is busier sounding than the rest of Telehors, the clanging string sounds and almost animal-like electronics are a world away from the relaxed vibes found on the other tracks.
There are times when the pieces are less than exciting. Towards the middle of the album, Smutny seems to lose steam. There’s a track or two that really could have been left off the album which would have made the CD flow much better. “Atlantiscape” peters out midway through the piece and despite Smutny’s best efforts it never gets back on track. The following piece, “Sayls,” also adds little to the album. With these two duds in the centre of the album, they ruin the run that Smutny builds up and it takes a little while before I can get comfortably back into the music.
Telehors is a fine album, it may not be a stunning masterpiece but I certainly wouldn’t kick it out of bed in the morning. There’s a lot of room here for Smutny to explore new realms of sound, it would be a shame if rested on his laurels and produced more of the same. He shows significant promise, especially towards the end of the album, and I’d be interested to see how a follow up to this album would weigh up.
Earth Covers Earth was the first Current 93 album I obsessed over. I acquired it not long after I found a copy of Emblems for $2.89 in a bargain bin at a record store where none of the clerks had ever heard of David Tibet or Current 93. It was a godsend. When I first heard Emblems it was like being drawn towards a black hole, and when I finally sealed my fate by listening to Earth Covers Earth I was pulled beyond the event horizon. One of the things I love about this album is the mixture of Tibet’s own lyrical songwriting, traditional tunes, and the obscure metaphysical poetry set to music. Pervaded by a vitriolic melancholy, I listen to it when I want to evoke the intermingled feelings of sadness, hope, futility, anger, joy and faith.
World Serpent, now defunct, distributed the disc that I have. Among the 12 songs collected are the six from the original LP release of Earth Covers Earth on United Dairies, as well as an additional version of “The Dilly Song.” The second song on the disc “Hourglass (for Diana)” immediately spoke to me on my first listen, and it still speaks to me today. Seventeenth century poet John Hall speaks through it across the centuries with David Tibet as his living mouthpiece. Simple but elegant guitar tracery forms the perfect propulsive backdrop for the quavering violin, at first just sliding out a slow line, a force that builds in tandem with Tibet’s impassioned recitation. When he sings the words, “how senseless are our wishes / yet how great! / with what toil we pursue them / with what sweat! / yet most times for our hurts / so small we see / like children crying for some mercurie” the song kicks in with the violinist sawing hasty circular notes across the strings, as Tibet continues to spit forth his lyrical invective against the works of mankind.
At the same time the words show compassion and understanding. I had a gut reaction to the paradoxical lyrics for the song, taken from the poem “On An Houre-Glasse” and my obsession led me to look further into the works of John Hall. Many were only available on microfiche in the rare book room at Cincinnati’s downtown library. The song is repeated on the sixth track as “Hourglass (for Rosy Abelisk)” and here it is even more haunting with a lisping child’s voice reading it nearly deadpan. Accompanied by an eerie accordion drone courtesy of Steve Stapleton, and echoing female screams placed low in the mix, it is very disconcerting to hear the young child read lines like “issuing in blood and sorrow from the wombe / crauling in tears of mourning to the tombe.” The same voice also sings the title track, which is beautiful in its simplicity as the piano and guitar meld together striking poignant chords. The lyrics are taken from Henry King and again grapple with mans impermanence and the transience of all his efforts and works, the dominant theme of this collection, and a recurring one throughout all of David’s work. “Time Tryeth Truth” is another setting for the same words. Here the boy, David, and Rose Macdowall sing joined by a pensive flute in the foreground.
While David’s lyrical performance on “Rome (for Douglas P.)” is probably my least favorite on the disc, the song does have a nice murmuring drone coupled with guitar distortion that recurs with the chorus. The theme of Rome as a corrupt spiritual Imperium overlaying this world is characteristic of Tibet’s work. His visionary conception of Rome, while highly personal and idiosyncratic, also puts him in league with other cultural heroes of mine like William Blake, who believed that Roman art was destructive to the natural imagination, and Philip K. Dick who believed that history stopped in the first century A.D. the Roman Empire never having ended. Though less refined on this song, the motif finds its apogee on Black Ships Ate the Sky from 2006 where his conjuration of Caesar as Antichrist reaches tangible perfection.
The disc also brings four songs recorded in Tokyo and originally intended for release on a Japanese album that was never completed. In my opinion the lyrics for “At the Blue Gates of Death” are where David began to tap into his authentic voice as a poet, though the first version of the song is cluttered and suffers from the extra noise. The children singing in the background are interesting but his penchants for using their voices is used to a more satisfying effect on All The Pretty Little Horses. The bass guitar, played backwards, is what muddles up the mix, taking attention away from the words, which are the songs strength. His voice is also less sure of itself than it seems on “At the Blue Gates of Death (Before and Beyond Them).” In the second when he sings along to a simpler accompaniment of guitar and Rose’s vocal harmonies he is at his most vulnerable, and his most durable, which makes it all the more endearing. It is a song that I have returned to again and again over the years. The symbolism and allegory that I’ve come to expect from David are all present, but here he is more accessible because he has let the guard of overly cryptic lyrics down.
The closing “The Dreammoves of the Sleeping King” is a great example of the combined genius arrived at when Steve Stapleton and David work together. Again, the music shares methods of working and common motifs that pop up repeatedly throughout Current 93’s discography. This twenty-minute barrage of somnolent madness is quite similar to that heard on Faust. Both contain the voices of children reading fragmentary bits of the Lord’s Prayer, as if it alone would protect them from the nightmarish and otherworldly forces the sounds invoke. Melted they smear across the audio spectrum in hazy blurs of thickly swathed vibrato. Ever malleable, it contains moments that appeal to both my darker and more whimsical sensibilities. Stapleton and Tibet had this material in mind for a film they wanted to make about the land where dreams go to when they die. The film was never made, and some of the other music for it, as yet unreleased, still remains lurking in their archives.
Pictured on the cover and in the inlay are colorful photographs of a strange cast of characters: Rose Macdowall, Tony Wakeford, Douglas P., Ian Read, John Balance, Tibet, Steve Stapleton, Diana Rogerson, and children. As I started to trace David Tibet’s influences and the various connections making up his musical family tree I was initiated into a whole new world of listening, and of literature. The music on this disc opened me up and in the process I was transformed. In 2005 the Free Porcupine Society reissued the original six tracks in a limited vinyl run. It would be nice to see the 12 songs from the CD reissued, remastered, repackaged and remixed. I’m sure some related material could also be scrounged up for inclusion. David and his friends at Coptic Cat have already done so with a number of other albums from Current 93’s extensive back catalogue. Earth Covers Earth deserves the same lavish treatment.
So, I don't really know how to deal with the total onslaught of Bastard Noise splits I've gotten since November. Some are tried and true BN skull noise as anyone who's been following this band is familiar with. A couple others, including the CD, show the core duo of Nelson and Wood pushing the edges of their well-established sound. On The Red List, like the recent full-length, Rogue Atronaut, a drummer has been added back into the fold and Wood is picking up the bass guitar again, returning right back to where Man Is the Bastard left off.
Like great film noir, everypiece of Murcof's puzzle is obviously manufactured and manipulated andcalculated and refined; it so completely captures a tone that I don'tmind that the sets are fake or the lighting is hyper-real.
I was introduced to Murcof's work with last year's Utopia single and I was hoping that the follow up album to that would be as good as the single promised. With Remembranza,Murcof does not disappoint. It's difficult to say where this musicwould fall in record bins filed by genre, but what matters is thatregardless of the conventions of the particular slice of the musicalspectrum that Murcof is working in, he manages to fill his songs withdepth and atmosphere. Remembranza is full of distant, reverbsoaked pianos, suspensful string arrangements that hang in the air likesmoke in a dark, shady pub, and autoclave-cleaned beats that nearlyfall into minimal techno rhythms, but rarely serve as the impetus fordance. The result plays out like techno noir made for headphones ratherthan dancefloors. This is music for murder mysteries and hardenedgumshoes and crazy dames, but it's all controlled so precisely that itnever evokes a real, urgent sense of dread. People notusually won over by the abstraction and detachment of clicky minimalistelectronica should find that Remembranza supplies enough clicksand pings and muted thumps to stand in for that style, while it alsoprovides the emotional backdrop of a film score or well-orchestratedpop music. I'd love to hear this record with some sultry, bluesy vocalsover it. As is, it's still a wonderful piece of deep listening moodmusic just waiting for a film to be shot to go with it.
Pup is another entry into the highly nuanced, subtle, and delicate world ofminimalism that at one time would have been called “ambient” but nowgoes by titles like “lowercase.” There’s too much of this sortof thing for me to be able to stay abreast of, but Dan Abrams’ work asFenton is solid and enjoyable.
Although Fenton creator Dan Abrams is from California, this disc comes all the way from Japan, by way of theJapanese label Plop. It's a record formorning listening: every song feels like a beginning of sorts to ajourney that is never exactly spelled out or completed. The songs arebuilt up from loops of pristine guitar plucking and the artifacts of along, long delay time. While I see music like this played out all thetime by folks with a single guitar and a loop pedal, it’s obvious thatAbrams is not just knocking these tunes out in a matter of minutes andrendering them to tape. There isn’t much to the compositions,but they grow organically, and they are finely balanced and carefully mixedto reward deep listening. A disc like this finds me willing to acceptit differently at different times.
Without the time and solitudenecessary to devote complete attention to Pup, the recordbecomes a pleasant background texture to my day, but something that isultimately not recognizable or distinguished. Given an hour to sit downwith headphones or near field monitors, the record plays altogetherdifferently and the subtle layers of sound never get boring becausethere is almost always something else to explore. At other times, whenI want to concentrate but can’t, I imagine that Pup isthe basis of another record somewhere with drums and voices and a bandusing simple looped guitar as a foundation rather than the focus.
This is the nature of music like this, and why it’s so hard for me withmy schedule to get into it fully. I suspect that the tensionthere is exactly why music like this needs to exist: to give us areason to slow down, zone out, and bathe ourselves in microscopic beadsof sound. I only wish that were possible more often.
Virgin Prunes formed in Dublin in 1977, part of the fertile Lypton Village artpunk scene that also spawned U2. Instead of Bono and The Edge, Virgin Prunes had the equally absurdly named Gavin Friday, Guggi, Dave-id, Dik and Pod (later adding Haa Lacka Binttii and D'Nellon). From a very early point, it became clear that while U2 were aiming for global chart domination, Virgin Prunes were more interested in remaining aggressively idiosyncratic, developing their own unique brand of transgressive, avant-garde performance art and a wildly anarchic take on post-punk rock.Depending on who's being consulted, the band name either refers to an Irish slang for masturbation or a term for a person with a particular kind of sexual hang-up. A cult fixture from the early singles until their 1986 swansong The Moon Looked Down and Laughed, the Prunes are barely remembered today. Much of their work was outstandingly original, and yet it has remained criminally ignored and rarely heard, largely due to the near-total unavailability of their back catalog. Initially available only in small vinyl and cassette editions, the catalog has suffered over the years from poorly mastered bootleg CD reissues that immediately went out of print. Mute Records, working alongside principal visionary Gavin Friday, attempt to rectify this situation with the release of five definitively remastered and repackaged reissues of the Virgin Prunes back catalog, with bonus tracks, lyrics and rare band photos included with each album. Since the Prunes disbanded, Gavin Friday has maintained a tenuous connection with the mainstream, recording a series of contemporary pop albums and doing soundtrack work for the popular Irish films In The Name of the Father and The Boxer. He scored a minor hit with the track "Angel," which appeared on the soundtrack for Baz Lurmann's Romeo and Juliet, and he can be seen performing in a scene from Lurmann's garish musical Moulin Rouge. In addition to occasional collaborations with his friend Bono, Friday has also worked with a number of other artists, contributing vocals to Coil's Scatology, Dave Ball's In Strict Tempo and The Fall's Wonderful and Frightening World Of The Fall.
The chronological beginning of the reissue series is A New Form of Beauty, in many ways the most ambitious of the Virgin Prunes' various projects. A New Form of Beauty was intended as seven-part artistic cycle exploring the band's inversion of the standard concept of beauty, reflected in their eccentric costumes and bizarre neo-primitive face paint. The Prunes were tuned in to an Artaudian current of perverse beauty and outlandishly confrontational performance, and this manifests quite well in the music itself. In many ways, their freakish attire and dark sense of melodrama served as a blueprint for the emerging goth scene, but the Prunes had talent and creativity that their followers often lacked. A New Form of Beauty Parts I through IV are collected here for the first time, originally released separately on 7", 10" and 12" EPs and a cassette. (Part V was an exhibition held in 1981, Part VI is an unpublished book and Part VII is an unreleased film.) The music is mercurial and often difficult; dark and overwrought; jagged and dissonant. Gavin Friday's vocals are twisted and menacing on the 10-minute "Come To Daddy," a lopsided avant-punk epic propelled by a brutally distorted, metronomic beat. The song tumbles over itself by the seven-minute mark, turning into a clattering free-improv with Friday screaming desperately: "No one cares about Mammy! No one cares about Mammy!" Their style seems equally informed by glam rock, Krautrock and their punk contemporaries, somewhat comparable to Public Image Ltd.'s Metal Box but existing an aesthetic sphere of its own invention. "Sweethome Under White Clouds" is another deconstructed punk song, this time with a sinister mantra and undercurrents of atmospheric drone. And "Sad World" is something else entirely: a gloomy paean to misery that slowly fades into drug-damaged oblivion. The overlapping vocals of Gavin and Guggi, which often form a tense call-and-response conversation, is one of the Prunes' unique trademarks. "Beast (Seven Bastard Suck)" is a dark, chaotic slab of malevolence punctuated by the crack of a bullwhip. Even when I sense the Prunes are just fucking around with delay peddles, as on "Abbagal," the effect is positively eerie. Disc two consists of Part IV, a 37-minute live performance entitled "Din Glorious," which moves freely between energetic performances of their songs to blasts of terrifying noise, grotesquely distorted vocals and deeply unsettling tape manipulations. A New Form of Beauty is practically begging for rediscovery and reappraisal as one of the most wildly imaginative and unorthodox documents produced in the post-punk era. Stay tuned over the next four issues for reviews of the rest of this critical series of reissues.
Threshold House At first listen, COILANS seems like Exhibit A for the sort of experimental audio that functions as more of an intellectual or conceptual pleasure, rather than the sort of viscerally satisfying music I've come to expect from Coil. It clocks in at well over four hours of entirely unstructured, rhythm-less high-frequency sine-waves and subtly shifting AC hum. Tracks have no beginning or end, no point-counterpoint or resolution, and no tonal consistency. This new three-disc set also includes a DVD of synchronized digital animations for four of the tracks. It's a reissue and expansion of ANS, a limited edition, tour-only CD released last year, minimally packaged in an unmarked black plastic clamshell. This new boxed set comes in a beautiful foldout cardboard package (identical to the recent reissue of Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy for Lilith) decorated with pictures of the disused ANS machine itself, sitting neglected in a basement room of the Moscow State University, rarely used and in dire need of a radical overhaul. It was built in 1958 by Evgeny Murzin, who set out to create a synthesizer capable of producing the full range of audible frequency via a unique photoelectric process. The composer inscribes his visual "score" onto a glass plate covered with sticky black mastic, slides it through the machine, which reads the inscribed plate and converts the etchings into sound produced by a system of 800 oscillators. In the liner notes, which provide further technical information about the machine, Coil acknowledge that it takes a lot of practice and skill for the user to relate the marks on the plate to the resultant sounds. Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke (whose name is misspelled in the notes) spent an entire year of intensive work with the machine to produce his one and only piece of electronic music entitled "Flow." However, Coil spent only a few days with the ANS, so by their own admission, the sounds on these three discs cannot be described as "compositions" in any sense. Instead, the sounds represent an accidental interpretation of Coil's visual art into audible electricity. As such, it is pointless to assess the musical merit of any of these pieces. The soundpieces in the set are the work of various solo and group alignments of Jhonn Balance, Peter Christopherson, Ossian Brown, Thighpaulsandra and Ivan Pavlov of COH. The notes do not identify which track features which personnel, either because they can't remember or they think it doesn't matter. The CD wallets (and the prints included with the first edition of the set) feature some of the line drawings that were used to make these pieces, but once again, the listener is given no indication which drawings produced which sounds. The drawings operate as Spare-style magical talismans, where occult symbols and "alphabet of desire" glyphs representing words or phrases (such as the tautological "IT JUST IS" on the back of disc B) exist as arcane sigillizations. But the ANS is able to take these occult strategies a step beyond the usual, by transforming them into an entirely exotic lexicon of ghostly electric frequencies. This relation of visual image to sound had the effect of a strange form of synaesthesia on me as I waded through these four discs of unprocessed analog tones; I began to form novel mental connections between sound and vision, thoughts and symbols. Halfway through the third disc I had become like Nikola Tesla, obsessively listening to electronic signals trying to pick out messages he was certain were being transmitted by extraterrestrials. Is it possible for the mind to subconsciously decode this esoteric system of pulsations, throbs, clicks and whirrs? It's impossible to say with any certainty, but the mere suggestion that it might be so makes the sound entirely compelling. At first glance, the DVD animations seemed no more inventive than WinAmp visuals, but I soon noticed the subtle psychedelic abstractions present in each perfectly synchronized schema. By the end of my COILANS adventure, I was tuned into a heretofore unexplored magickal current, a current that sparks and buzzes with vibrations of the manifest spirit. Electricity has truly made angels of us all.
There is something otherworldly lurking just below the surface of Klas Rydberg's strained howls that is slightly off-putting, something that is not so much heard as felt, something that draws you in while oozing a slight uneasiness. Where a majority of the increasing number of sludgy, pseudo doom acts are content to pound away on the same note for hours on end in the name of "atmosphere," this Swedish septet strives for something more on their third full length.
Salvation is an eight song, 72 minute behemoth that's as diverse as it is excruciatingly heavy. While the bulk of the album's duration is spent creeping under the weight of Johannes Persson's immense guitar tone that's as percussive as any drum set, the band is not afraid to add their own flourishes to a style that can quickly become stagnant due to its repetitious nature. Nowhere else is this more evident than on "Crossing Over," which pits Rydberg's underrated singing voice against a slow building wall of jangled guitar that would sound at home on any bold dreampop album. While this is one of my personal favorite tracks, it does seem out of place amongst the oppressive rage of its peers and has a tendency to slow down what is already becoming a physically arduous listen by the seventh track. That's not to say the remainder of the album is without its placid moments, but they are composed in such a way as to not reveal what beast waits around the corner or beneath that proverbial surface, consisting of deftly composed goth rock morsels with a decidedly "non-American" vibe that's difficult to explain and separates them from their contemporaries. The first track, "Echoes," even works with a slight Middle Eastern-themed solo as it slowly builds to the deafening, cathartic roar prevalent throughout the more straightforward "Adrift" and "Vague Illusions." With the volume up enough (which it should be at all times), it is even possible to detect the tasteful contributions of Anders Teglund, whose sparse synth work walks the thin line between subtle and barely audible, adding yet another layer to this dense masterpiece. While the cruel reality surrounding this album is that it will more than likely get lost in the shuffle of a great many other bands who channel 80's-era Swans into their particular brand of madness, this one is worth the effort. - Drew Wright
In describing the sound of Mono's third full-length album it's hard not to invoke a number of bands whom I have nevertheless sworn to eschew in the body of this review. Let it suffice to say that the music is sweeping, anthemic, instrumental, crescendo-heavy, at once deliberately delicate and mindlessly reckless; this much should give you some idea of the musical path on which Mono tread (some might even call it a new path to Helicon, to tell the truth).
Despite the surface similarities to a cadre of aphonic groups, Mono have a hook all of their own. They bring to light a very palpable and very realized "music of anxiety" (not to be confused with the anxiety of music, which you might ascribe to John Cage, first and foremost). This music of anxiety masquerades as songs which you might feel comfortable introducing to your parents, who enjoy all of the refinements of classical. In other words, the songs are lovely and accessible. But certain songs are filled with massive building themes and bridges, each one successively getting louder or faster or both. It is in these precise parts where the anxiety lurks. To illustrate, I offer a challenge: try and fall asleep to "Lost Snow," or "16.12," both of which start off innocently enough, lulling any quasi-narcolept into a comfort blanket of promised sleep and placidity. But then the songs evolve. They burst forth. They blossom violently like a flower which does not merely let its petals spread out gently, but rather one which erupts and explodes, sending thick clouds of pollen into the air and leaving its pistils and stamens shaking in the aftershock. Mono's style can be clawingly unsettling, full of nervous energy and discomfort. It does not allow you to sit and standby; instead it sucks you into the whirlwind. Yet there is always an outlook to the light at the end of the song, after the guitars collide and distort, where the sonic storm yields to space and eventually catharsis. The formula (polarization of a song's harshness and quietude) is not new, but Mono executes it as elegantly as any band whose skinny fists stir up such tempests of sounds which assail the ears for ten minutes at a time. Not every song proceeds along these lines. "A Thousand Paper Cranes" and "2 Candles, 1 Wish" stay hushed, concentrated, and focused throughout. The sequencing on the album seems to indicate that Mono is well aware of the anxiety of their songs. The band acknowledges the need for rest between the storms of their mightier songs and they acquiesce by putting the softer bits between the harder ones. In this way, the spaces between the songs mimic the spaces within them.