Review Summary: throwing gold at a wall to see if it sticks
Pointillism, an art form pioneered by post-impressionist artist Georges Seurat, is a technique in which small dots of primary colour are shaped and arranged carefully to create a distinct texture, at once manifesting a subject and creating the illusion of secondary colour. Thousands of infinitesimal components formatted in such a considered manner that the sum appears more robust and vibrant than it actually is. Close your eyes a little bit, gently guide the thing out of focus, and the piece of art is still a piece of art – colourful, a language in itself.
Alright, cool, so,
The primary colours that make up Monobody are as follows: guitar, bass, drums, another bass, and keyboard. To further this earnest but realistically hard-to-maintain metaphor, this self-titled record transpires like a pointillist’s attempt at surrealism – all tangible things perforated and moulded into aught like clay. No need to focus. I digress.
You could call Monobody jazz fusion, but to do so implies that jazz is the primary component in a veritable miscellany of styles, and thus the throwaway becomes reductive, negligent, as throwaways usually are. Are there not traces of old school prog-rock a lά Gentle Giant in
Curry Courier Career? Does
Gilgamesh not tightrope between South American rhythms and no-holds-barred retro dance synths? Isn’t
Country Doctor, with all its meandering post-rock affectations, held together by math-rock melodies, despite its brittle frame? The devil is in the details.
Those details – and the way Monobody handle them – render the discourse surrounding genre superfluous. Behind it all moves the rhythm section (an impetus in the truest sense), steady to the point of steadfast and intricate to the point of dizzying (so close your eyes a little bit, gently guide the thing out of focus). The back and forth between the two basses becomes the taut web of notes that hold this record up as it spins and bristles and tip-toes across eggshells; nothing falling through the gaps. The basslines are tapped sometimes, too. Neat.
And here I am wondering how these songs are even written.
Self-Titled’s glistening, byzantine prog-rock instrumentals sublimate and crystallise subtly even under an attentive, listening ear; constantly moving forward, threading in new ideas before abandoning them for something more interesting.
I guess I just love bands with short attention spans -- bands that spend their process chasing after new sounds before realising everything they’ve written falls under the same umbrella anyway. I listened to this record a few times today, whilst drifting in and out of sleep like someone (me) who got two hours rest the night prior, and it was still gorgeous, still wonderful out of focus. It seems that where Monobody is concerned, there’s too many dots, imperceptibly small, to keep track of. The end product, though? It's undeniably beguiling, even if I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be.
