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.”

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