Full Album Premiere and Review: The Mon, Eye
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on May 25th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream Eye by The Mon in its entirety. Album is out tomorrow on Supernatural Cat and available to order here.]
Eye is the second full-length from The Mon, a solo-project helmed by bassist/vocalist Urlo of Ufomammut, and whether it’s for the echoing reach of its atmosphere, the finer detailing in the ticking-clock plucked violin strings on “Burning From Afar,” the empty-space minimalism from which “The Manure of Our Remains” swells, or the low-end drone that underscores opener “The Sun,” it is an album that feels very much made for headphones.
Produced, mixed and mastered by Urlo in follow-up to 2018’s Doppelleben and sundry multimedia experiments under The Mon‘s banner, the 11-song/37-minute collection sees issue through Supernatural Cat and features artwork by Malleus, as Urlo finds his way into a kind of multi-tiered Neurot Recordings-esque DIY structure while at the same time bringing in guest contributors throughout the release, whether it’s Amenra‘s Colin H. Van Eeckhout contributing lyrics and vocals on the wistful “To the Ones,” Steve Von Till of Neurosis doing likewise, plus synth, for “Confession,” or the artist Francesca De Franceschi Manzoni adding her voice to the channel-spanning layers amid the quiet guitar march/synth of second track “Secret,” which instead of exploding into heft for another seven minutes as an Ufomammut song might, instead turns to blinding synth wash for its payoff. So it goes.
Sarah Pendleton of The Otolith (ex-SubRosa) is the most prominent of the guests, at least in terms of affecting the sound of the record. Her violin fits seamlessly into the psychedelic synth and backward guitar of “This Dark o’ Mine,” the longest inclusion at 5:10 with samples of what sounds like some kind of crackling dug deep into the mix under the at-least-doubled lead vocal from Urlo — who seems throughout to be inventing an alien cosmic folk branched off of Ufomammut‘s alien cosmic doom — and songs like the subsequent “Burning From Afar” and the Eeckhout-sung “To the Ones” are greatly bolstered texturally by her work, never mind that she’s there alongside Urlo as “The Sun” rises at the start of Eye as one of the first impressions the album makes.
Not to be forgotten or minimalized are the two guest spots on guitar from White Hills‘ Dave W., on “Burning From Afar” and “This Dark o’ Mine,” the latter a manipulated backwards solo and the former — which of course is the track after because I’m bouncing around here and that seems to be what the record wants as it gives you different worlds to explore, some lush, some purposefully not — buried somewhere amid the violin, synth, chime-or-chime-sound, low-end undulations and vocals that make up the track, the total impact like krautrock and surprisingly un-manic for how much has gone into it. There are a few flirtations with prog throughout as some of the vocal patterns might remind of earlier Porcupine Tree in the album’s midsection, but as a whole, Eye is strange enough and enough its own thing that the only genre that applies is ‘weirdo,’ and that is a flag righteously flown.
But not gregariously. Most of Eye, at even its loudest, manifests its heft through atmosphere and emotionalism. And the guests of course add much to the proceedings and give reviewers something to talk about and it’s nice to have friends, etc., but the core of The Mon is of course in Urlo‘s craft and performance. He is all alone on “The Manure of Our Remains,” and the bulk of side B in the final four pieces, the brief instrumental “Mimmi” beginning a procession through the acoustic/synth-based poetic repetitions of “Where,” the sci-fi (or horror, I guess) drone ceremony of “Vampyr” — quick like “Mimmi” at 1:33 — and the finale “Pupi,” which builds on the folkish impression with a Donovan-from-space quiet, semi-spoken vocal delivery in layers and declarative guitar strum to announce the end of its lone verse, the song ending instrumentally before some last captured sample, obscure but likely significant if only to Urlo himself, finishes.
That shift in structure would seem to happen as “Burning From Afar” leads off side B, but with Eeckhout stepping in on “To the Ones” just prior to “Mimmi,” the feeling is more intimate by the end of the album. It’s still given aurally to breadth, but the interplay of short and kinda-short songs in that four-track last stretch of underscores the experimentalist heart of The Mon as an outfit, and highlights the shift from the voluminous drones and outright heavy — sometimes even drummed! — plods that made up Doppelleben to this more contemplative, vocally-focused style. But whatever else it does, and it does plenty, Eye does not allow for easy narrative. In its folkish shift, its experimentalist range around guitar-and-voice-centered traditions, and in the elements of sound that seem to come and go throughout, sometimes with personnel, it is a complex and multifaceted listening experience, Urlo‘s voice guiding the proceedings with emergent confidence and a still-explorational intent.
By which I mean that The Mon declares itself clearly in this material, but the clarity is in the act of feeling its way through the songs. Many artists will tell you they didn’t know where a song was going until it got there. There are moments in Eye that seem genuinely born out of that kind of experience, and the overarching impression is still one of forward growth to come, whatever that might mean in a context that’s already demonstrated such breadth and an ability to pivot in sound from one release to the next. The outer-reaches vocal chanting of “The Manure of Our Remains,” the sweet and ethereal winding of the violin and synth of “The Sun,” and the ideas-parade that caps, along with the fluidity of personnel and the general variation of sonic purpose give Eye a scope that goes beyond the hearing, but it remains emotionally resonant however far out it goes, and so its kaleidoscopic intimacy is cohesive when met on its own level. That’s not something every listener is going to want or be able to do — it never is — but The Mon is more dug into the approach than the outcome here, and there’s no guarantee that the same approach would be taken again, despite the fact that there’s enough vision at work in the material to flesh out an entire career arc.
In other words, it’ll meet you out there. It’s waiting.
