Upfront, before we get started, an admission: my adoration for Mono goes deep. So deep does it go, indeed, that the Japanese band is one of a select few to ever truly take me out of the live room they were playing one end of, transporting my senses to a place entirely of their own design. They have, more than once, left me with a considerable lump in my throat that no amount of beer can quite suppress. Things Get Emotional.
The Tokyo-based four-piece’s trajectory since 2001’s debut album ‘Under The Pipal Tree’ has only ever been an upward one. Their stirring instrumentals adhere to post-rock superstructures only in terms of basic telegraphing of movements; when the shifts occur, they do so with greater weight and purpose than almost any of the band’s substantial amount of perceived peers, lending the band’s material a poignancy uncommon in music without lyrics to aid its connection with an audience. Their avoidance of language actually registers as one all of its own: universal, understandable by all.
‘Hymn To The Immortal Wind’ is Mono’s fifth long-player, and finds the band encompassing a greater number of string embellishments, fleshing their guitar-bass-drums arrangements into almost soundtrack-like, quasi-classical forms, each sweep of grandiose melody evoking a panorama of sumptuous imagery in the mind’s eye. As each of these seven pieces unfolds, the listener is – please pardon the cliché – taken on a journey outside of themselves, the layering of guitars upon guitars constructing wholes that reach beyond the conventional limitations of post-rock songwriting, and into realms where the heart rules the head. You will, without feeling it coming on ‘til it’s too late, become entirely absorbed in this music, surrounded by it, consumed. And you’ll do well to leave without feeling its touch.
‘Pure As Snow (Trails Of The Winter Storm)’ sits as this record’s centrepiece, a combination of combustive guitars, which crunch and crackle like they’re running off a generator inside the core of the sun, and shimmering strings, which rise and fall around the cacophonous elements like, quite literally, a blizzard engulfing a cloud-reaching tower to the heavens. The howling, the pounding, the manner in which everything is underpinned by a deft subtlety of execution rarely heard in music that seems marketed at fans of the heavier end of the rock spectrum: it all adds up to a simply astounding piece of music. And it’s one surrounded by equally engrossing works.
And, pleasingly, repetition never intrudes. While the band’s formula is not one of revelatory scale, their special handling of genre-recognisable aspects ensures that Mono stand out from the pack as a band with a singular agenda – to surround their fans with some of the most beautiful instrumental rock ever committed to record. And, throughout ‘Hymn…’, their quality control never once falters, and cadence is respected in the record’s tracklisting – ‘Follow The Map’ is piano-led and intimate, the following ‘The Battle To Heaven’ a brooding, boisterous successor, yet they segue wonderfully well.
Working with Steve Albini is a wise move for Mono – the engineer is not one to interfere particularly with the acts he records, and other producers on the look out for a way to make their name would have undoubtedly over-egged Mono’s material into a sickly sweet muddle of over-the-top orchestral passages and predictable chugga breakdowns. But by taking a hands-off approach, Albini allows the Japanese outfit to flex their mightier musical muscles only when they choose to, which often is far enough into a track to render fair-weather followers unmoved. But, as any acolyte of note will tell you, the trick to understanding Mono is to let them play to you, at you; you don’t so much listen to them as gawp, dumb-struck with love, as wonders unfold.
By which I mean, simply: you cannot hurry perfection. And, like much of Mono’s canon to date, ‘Hymn…’ is as close to that magical noun as instrumental music of this kind can come without transcending the format entirely.
