I put on Monolith, the new full-length from Chico, California, progressive instrumetallers La Fin du Monde, while a riding New Jersey Transit train for the first time in over a year. This wouldn’t be significant but for the fact of its former daily routine and the stout refusal I’ve made to board this or that numbered car since my “daily routine” earned its preceding “former.” A mental block, an associative trauma; there are numerous ways to frame it with varying levels of drama between them, but the point is it was something I wasn’t comfortable doing, and all I had to carry me through was La Fin du Monde.

Fitting, somehow, that their name (also that of a microbrew ale) should translate from French into “The End of the World.” Their intricate strains of technicality — five in total on the self-released Monolith — coupled with my lack of comfort at the time seemed to put me in a state of acute awareness as to the slips in and out of guitar-led passages and sundry other progressions. This is a brand of music that, as yet, has no genre tag. It blends post-metal musical thinky-thinkydom with heavy/ambient switches and rarely relies on traditional structures. Instrumental post-prog? I don’t know. The “post-” thing is thrown around a lot these days as a catch all. “Cherish rock,” maybe, since there’s something sweet about the ringing guitar tones that culminate “Dismal Tide.”

Whatever you want to call it, La Fin du Monde execute their style with a precise grace over these tracks, their unique twin-guitar/twin-bass (Adam Scarborough and Chris Roberts/Mike Crew and Josh Kinsey, respectively) approach allowing them to noodle all the more intricately on “They Will Never See Us,” before switching to the track’s heavier, more straightforward movement. Opener “These Babies are Edible” had some of that heft, but was cloaked more in a jazzy futurism and didn’t last as long. “Beast IV” reminds of that oddly-timed prowess, notes ringing over Dan Elsen’s drumming in a succession difficult to follow but in which it’s easy to lose yourself nonetheless. There’s a build to a momentary climax — as there should be — and the song closes quietly, perhaps the tightest execution of what La Fin du Monde are about, musically.

Should be no surprise Monolith closes with its longest track, “We Will Fall” (10:34). The extra time is given largely to atmosphere, which has been no small consideration throughout, but is ramped up here as are the switches back and forth from outward heavy riffing. The style demands these dynamics, and La Fin du Monde do an amiable job of representing themselves within their given approach. The interplay that winds down “We Will Fall” offers the notion that the band have more to say — so to speak — than their time here allows, and it’s not a stretch to imagine they’re a band from whom we’ll be hearing more soon. Many of their parts are lyrical or complex enough that to have some guy screaming over them probably wouldn’t add anything to the overall mood, so don’t expect to miss a singer much should you decide to check them out, which, you could do far worse than to do. Monolith doesn’t necessarily require you to leave your comfort zone to listen, but coming from a group of guys so clearly willing to abandon their own, it’s not a terrible idea either.

La Fin du Monde on MySpace

Tags: California, Chico, La Fin du Monde, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.