Audio By Carbonatix
Japan’s chromatic quartet MONO balances bursts of catharsis and pleas for clemency. The groups exalts tone-rending reverence with the deft delivery of many Chicago postrock groups and equally hefty, heavenly bands including Boston’s Isis and Texans Explosions in the Sky. Six years in existence, MONO has established itself adroit at seeding lucid, mercurial melodies amid frothing, sullen upheaval, exhibited yet again on 2006’s You Are There. One moment the instrumental Tokyo foursome will unleash a claustrophobic din of punishing riffs, and the next unfurl contemplative drones of melancholic orchestration that hang in the air with rapt intimacy. In ten-minute engagements, grit-glazed scree gives way to fricative, tape-hiss-flecked elegance escaping as if sighs wrapped in smoke (sometimes acrid but as often a lulling waft). Whereas MONO’s last album — Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and the Sun Shined — was a conceptual rumination on war and peace inspired by a postnuclear short story, You Are There is a less thematic but no less narrative flurry of reflective arrangements and distorted cascades that exhibit affirming grandeur even when at their most minute.
