MONO - Hymn To The Immortal Wind

With their reputation now firmly established, three years on from their last album, "You Are There", Mono return to the wider public with "Hymn To The Immortal Wind", released via Temporary Residence. The Japanese quartet, whose body of work carries a fascination that defies easy sonic categorisation, plays between classicism and rugged surges, revealing in this "hymn to the immortal wind" its most tender and hazy side.

The images of memory seem to flow one behind the other, as vivid in spirit as they are yellowed in form. Hymns, as we know, are flowing poems that glide by lightly while still carrying a dense emotional weight. And Mono manage to capture their heart and essence, stretching their sonic textures across horizontal planes, their ripples almost always softened by strings.

The fluidity of the notes benefits from this, overlapping in a natural flow, far removed from any sense that the mechanism has been artificially built or engineered. The hymn to the wind is thus a free game, loosened from the reins of structure, hovering and spinning on itself in a light, unhurried motion.

Whereas in certain earlier works — think of "Walking Cloud And Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered And The Sun Shined" — the formal construction of the tracks followed a kind of rigid, predetermined script that ended up trivialising their purely emotional dimension, here the expressiveness and immediacy of the sound reach absolute peaks.

It would be misleading, however, to assume that the immediacy of the sound goes hand in hand with simplicity of notes, because "Hymn To The Immortal Wind" is not an easy album, for two fundamental reasons: first, the sheer bulk of over seventy minutes of music, and then certainly the choice to pursue a formula some consider long dead, but which in many ways still feels vivid. The chapter Mono open with this effort is, however, definitely a new one: the dominant factor is the twenty-eight-piece orchestra, while the guitars quiet down and it's the violins and the occasional cymbal that become the fulcrum of the compositions.

The introductory section of the opening "Ashes In The Snow" is about as close as it gets to Sigur Rós, amid faint little bells and an enchanting piano, before it breaks off abruptly. The classical warmth of the nearly eleven minutes of "Burial At Sea" revisits the band's trademark emotional climaxes, softened by a string section that reins in the guitars' action, rendering it mild and homogeneous. The notes trace a sea voyage, between endless moments of apparent calm and furious storms ready to erupt.

And while "Silent Flight, Sleeping Dawn" recalls the happiest moments of Rachel's, it's in "Pure As Snow (Trails Of The Winter Storm)" that the masterpiece unfolds: at the opening, scattered notes à-la Mogwai intertwine symmetrically, the violins come into play reinforcing the gust of wind that grows ever more sumptuous, first flowing with mounting vehemence, then suddenly calming down only to regain vigor in a spine-tingling finale. "The Battle To Heaven", true to its title, brings back the quartet's more Luciferian guise, turning out as gripping and forceful as it is perhaps somewhat locked into the climax mechanism: the surges and the noise of their early days still take hold of the four musicians' souls, as, wielding their guitars, they build an imposing wall of sound.

The closing "Everlasting Light" unfurls its narrative over a piano that unrolls scrolls of notes wrapped in orchestration, behind which guitars burst in, climbing vertically before collapsing back on themselves, leaving the close to a convincing run of violins.

"Hymn To The Immortal Wind" presents Mono in an unusual guise. Shunning easy soft/loud schemes and pulling off one of their most convincing works, the Japanese quartet have crafted a bewitching piece defined by its intimate classicism, one that leaves you truly stunned at several points. Between classicism, post-rock and instrumental music, Mono have forged an ode that certainly won't fade away as easily as the wind through the folds of memory.

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25/03/2009