Mono — You Are There
Mono have made their name for producing a certain type of slowly building melodic crescendo and the albums opener The Flames Beyond The Cold Mountain is no exception. The mix doesn’t emphasis the strings but they are there propping up the delicate guitar plucking and wide reverbed melody. The melody’s that Mono produce are to my ears very distinctively non western, I don’t know if they tune their instruments to eastern scales (probably not) but their choice of chord scales and short repetitive finger work is certainly not something you would expect to hear from Mogwai (A band they are often compared to). The track builds pace and grandeur before falling into the chasm of epic overload. The sound is vast but the underlying melody seems to be buried under distortion and drone to the point that without several listens it is obscured altogether. Like so many Japanese groups Mono use noise very effectively and with little hesitancy. The post rock staple quite loud quiet loud formulae is employed for the track final epic floor sweeping minutes.
A heart Has Asked For the Pleasure is a short pastoral piece that uses the string quartet and some nice keys again suggesting images of meditative places in the far east full of minimalist rock gardens and ancient dramas.
Yearning follows a similar pattern to the first piece building with lovely guitar melodies followed by powerful full on metal assault soothed by pastoral ambience only to come back more aggressive and forceful. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this music. It’s wonderfully epic and technically well performed but they only seem to have two tricks. The loud epic one and the quiet pastoral one.
The title track and the following track The remains of the day liven things up with filmic orchestrations and pretty melodies without the bombast. The later is particularly pleasant featuring simple piano playing over a soundscape of backwards guitar drone.
The final track of the album Moonlight is my favourite not because is differs much from their set formulae but the melody and orchestration its almost Debussy like tonal intro which leads wonderfully into a short string intermezzo before settling down into another repetitive melodic build-up finishing loud and heavy and epic. It is these uses of repeated stripped down melodies that have led some commentators to see a lineage between the music of Godspeed you! black emperor, Do Make Say Think and others with the movement of American minimalists like Terry Riley, and Philip Glass. Whether this holds water is down to you’re personal interpretation but whatever background Mono come from they are certainly practiced masters of their particular craft, however little they seem to deviate from it.