Mono - Gone - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Throughout their six-year career, Mono has ascended consistently in both popularity and critical acclaim, with record sales and live show attendance corresponding. If there is any chance of breaking that spell, it lies in You Are There, without a doubt the prime contender to unite the live and recorded worlds of Mono. Once again captured to tape by Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio studios in Chicago, IL, the album extends the cinematic drama o 2003's Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and the Sun Shined (also recorded by Albini), while surpassing the sinister heaviness of 2002's lauded One Step More and You Die. If Walking Cloud was a nuclear winter, then You Are There is the post-war rebirth; steeped in an ominous creation-via-destruction atmosphere not heard since Neurosis' landmark Enemy of the Sun defined the sound more than a decade ago.

Just in time for their 10-year anniversary, Mono return with their fifth studio album. Written and arranged with a hopeful, romantic narrative in mind, the songs string together like chapters in an epic love story. The music is naturally majestic, with Mono's trademark wall of noise crashing beautifully against the largest chamber orchestra the band has ever enlisted. The instrumentation is vast, incorporating strings, flutes, organ, piano, glockenspiel, and tympani into their standard face-melting set up.

Just before recording their epic Inchdisaster pieceInch YOU ARE THERE, Mono began collaborating with fellow Tokyo native and modern electronic composer World's End Girlfriend. The result is a five-part sojourn of neoclassical grace and luminescence that defies lazy categorization. A miniature panoramic view of the sea on an eerily still day, the current swaying at an impossibly lazy pace and the sound of a thousand tiny waves crashing all at once.