Album review: Mono – Hymn To The Immortal Wind

Bands like Mono are practically unreviewable. That’s not to say Hymn To The Immortal Wind is bad – to the contrary, it’s a lovely album that I’ve enjoyed listening to just as much as their previous offerings – but it’s an incredibly difficult album to say anything substantial about.

Well, OK, that’s not strictly true; it might be more fair to say that the traditional approach of rock and pop music criticism doesn’t really work well with the post-rock sound of Mono and their contemporaries. Rock criticism usually focusses on personality and image, on narrative and on genre; post-rock abandons the first three and picks a negative value for the fourth. There are no lyrics or stage personae or fashions to latch on to; the music has a body, but it has no face.

For some listeners (myself included) that is part of the appeal; as much as I enjoy a panoply of musical styles, sometimes its sheer bliss to be able to step away from the cult of personality and listen to something like Hymn To The Immortal Wind, which is designed to transport you emotionally rather than intellectually. Mono don’t want to tell you about what happened to them last week; they want to make you feel something. Their work is a reaction to the real world, but not a commentary or re-enactment of it. Think about it for a minute, and you’ll realise how rare that is outside of classical music.

Of course, if you’re a long-term fan of Mono or of post-rock in general, this is all academic; Hymn To The Immortal Wind does exactly what you’d expect it to do, balancing vast swathes of reverberating guitar and keyboard tones against the fragile chime of glockenspiels and the film-score melodies of an orchestral string section, developing themes and space at a stately pace, building an audio landscape of geological proportions. They’re probably closest in sound and melodic approach to Explosions in the Sky, but where the Texans use strong firm lines of tone everything Mono do is wide, impressionistic, blurred at the edges like the sweep of a paintbrush. There’s a glacial beauty to it, like the sun on mountaintops seen from a plane; it doesn’t lead you, but it invites you to lose yourself.

In short: if you’re a fan of Mono already, you’ll want to get yourself a copy of Hymn To The Immortal Wind, as it consistently ticks all the boxes you’d hope it would. If you’re not yet a fan, but still find yourself occasionally bored of rock and metal’s narrative and sonic clichés, give Mono a chance to take you on a journey. You might well find yourself wondering why you never did it before.