Mono You Are There

The Japanese have an uncanny ability to take a western idea and improve it with logic, simplicity, and free thinking beyond the constraints of our contrived ideals and pretensions, until it is returned to us near-perfected, making everything that came before it obsolete. Technology, transport, architecture...

But music, great music, we still have that over them, right? I mean, Cornelius made a brief inroad to world domination, and The Boredoms remain as unconventional as ever, but mostly we are vaguely charmed by their quirkiness and slightly uncool, over-reaching enthusiasm to replicate our music and fashion. Here is where Mono come in.

Following a brief but inspiring UK tour last year, the Japanese quartet have emerged from the shadows with their fourth offering, You Are There, their most polished to date. Again the band have teamed up with long-term producer Steve Albini, and, still full of the loud crescendos and the delicately quiet interludes of 2003's Walking Cloud And Deep Red Sky..., You Are There represents a band rising in confidence and creativity. The Flames Beyond The Cold Mountain, sets the cinematic grandeur, resonating with haunting, tenterhooked strings followed by guitars layered into sonic outbursts. A Heart Has Asked For Pleasure glistens like snow falling in a nuclear winter, whilst the final track Moonlight throws in a surprising Calexican, Dick Dale on valium influence, possibly indicating Mono's next move.

You Are There has most of the elements from previous albums, even some of the more violent Sabbathesque moments from their more sinister second album One More Step And You Die, but there is always a point when a band finally finds itself, and attains a pinnacle, equalling the sum of its parts. Mono certainly aren't the finished article yet, and You Are There isn't their masterpiece, but you feel that they, like their contemparies Sigur Ros, Mogwai and Godspeed, have yet to find another gear, to create a record that lives up to the live performances. A record no more commercial than its predecessors, but complete, unrelentless, and transcendent to the point of mind-blowing. For now though, Mono are steadily building up a head of steam, no longer riding on the coat-tails of Stuart Braithwaite and co., but finding their own brand of melancholic beauty and ambient drone. Small pebbles are definitely growing into great rocks.