Mono
Hymn To The Immortal Wind

There are times when I don't want anything or anyone... perhaps after a day of stressful and cursed work... in a moment of longed-for solitude... times when I'd just like to disconnect from the world like you do with a television... you unplug it and there's darkness and silence. But the world is always there around me, besieging me with sounds and noises that at certain moments I want to keep out of my mind. In such situations, I try to create a sealed chamber that protects me from the outside, where sounds and anything else cannot come from outside... filling a room with sounds that defend me from the world. "Hymn To The Immortal Wind" (a title that made me fear an epic metal turn from Mono :D) is one of those catalogs of sounds that I use as an antidote from the rest of humanity...

From the very first sounds, you slip elsewhere... in this work, the immense Mono, even more so than the previous and wonderful "You Are There," highlight the compositional ability that allows them to produce emotional and engaging melodies like no one else today can in this genre... the addition of a 28-member orchestra ensures that strings and bows, etc. emphasize the melodic part of the compositions that, as usual, explode in the distorted roar of the electric guitars of "Yoda" and "Takaakira". It's the usual post-rock piece structure, at least regarding the first track in which, however, there is the added value of a counterpoint between rock and classical instrumentation that in the grand finale becomes a sonic ecstasy...
At the end of the piece, the room is full of sounds but already the theme of "Burial At Sea" is wreaking havoc on your soul with strokes of emotions... once the album starts, you can't escape... its sound flow is a sea of sounds in which you calmly float only to suddenly find yourself in a storm of sound/emotions that tears you apart inside... it shakes you... the sonic apparatus of Mono is the most beautiful thing one can find nowadays... an unmistakable trademark only partly attributable to groups like GY!BE and A Silver Mt. Zion who relied heavily on strings while the guitars remained strongly rock-oriented. Mono, on the other hand, have inherited much from Mogwai on how to use guitars, but by replacing the wild noise impulses of the Scots with ethereal musical tapestries in this album even more accentuated by the accompaniment of the strings that gives it an even more exciting mood... although it's true they don't give up their thunderous surges...

The room is now delicately saturated with "Silent Flight, Sleeping Dawn" where the orchestral setup that sees strings and piano dance makes you forget that, deep down, we are listening to a rock group... thoughts and emotions follow one another in a whole that takes us to inner dimensions that only certain music can reach... Mono are not improvised musicians, they know what they are doing, the melodies are the result of an emotional transport as well as a wise search for the right notes. This is demonstrated by "Pure As Snow (Trails of the Winter Storm)", where the sweetness of the guitars returns... then everything blends... mixes masterfully in an inextricable way, you can hardly distinguish the strings from the electric guitars... Mono manages to make their guitars sound like a set of violins... they make classical music with rock instruments... immense... only in those stunningly violent spasms do the guitars become a sea in storm that overwhelms everything without any chance... When the last stunning surge of "Everlasting Light" ends and gradually the sounds fade away, silence returns to the room... "The hymn to the immortal wind" has concluded... and I already hear the television too loud in the other room... the flow of cars on the street... I'm back... I'm among earthly sounds and visions... it's like waking up from a limbo... Mono had kidnapped me and taken me elsewhere... now I'm here again...

After the immeasurable GY!BE and A Silver Mt. Zion, after the first albums of Mogwai and Explosions in the sky this album represents the only interesting spur in a genre of music that has already given all it had to give and that rarely manages to offer interesting insights that deviate from all that series of bands that still pretend to be post-rockers without really saying anything that hasn't already been said and in a decidedly better way...