Review Summary: Exquisite sing-along gothic melodies over thumpy drums. And the cover has a neat picture of a boat.
Mono Inc. reminds me of a more energetic variety of Sisters of Mercy, with slightly more intense production and even more basic rhythms. I personally love the monotonous beats that often come out of the Gotho-Industrial complex, but I understand why rock and metal drummers often abhor what probably sounds mindlessly inane to an ear hungry for rhythmic complexity. But the monotony in this case is actually justified: The drummer Katha Mia also backs the vocals in adorable lady song. Blast beats are incompatible with this set-up.
Like most, this album is front-heavy in quality: Tracks 2 to 6 make a good sequence for a single session, as an accompaniment for, say, cleaning up after a single-skillet meal, perhaps scrambled eggs (only two more hours till dinner!). After that, though, their music starts sounding saccharine. The rest of the album has some good tracks, but it also has more misses than hits, and I haven’t bothered to sequence the hits in a playlist yet.
On Song Greed
Does anyone else experience this? I’m bouncing around on Spotify and run into a song by a band that I’ve never heard before, and POW! I’m flooded with musical ecstasy. I’m suddenly possessed with “I’ve gotta find more by these guys!” So I click to their discography, I am delighted by seeing an enormous back-catalogue, and I start panning, almost frantically, for gold: miss, miss, miss, hit!, miss, miss, hit!, miss, hit (maybe?), miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, then I finally get bored and a little frustrated. Either most of the songs suck, or the part of my brain that makes musical judgement has become numb (“habituated” psychologists call it). Whatever, now I’ve spent 45 minutes digging through this huge discography, finding in that time only two or three songs I’ll want to hear again.
This process reminds me of smoking a bunch of rock. Only that first puff is really wonderful; the second is immediately less satisfying, and then, having already spent a couple hundred dollars to get the damn stuff, you spend the rest of the night doing absolutely nothing else but sitting around a kitchen table for hours, fruitlessly chasing that first hit.
Happily, unlike expensive narcotics, which these days are sometimes secretly laced with fentanyl – and which in my experience are a total f*cking waste of time and money anyway, and the use of which is filled with all sorts of unrewarding and avoidable risks
outside of a fentanyl overdose – unlike pointless drugs that contribute to the degradation of Central and South American civilization, I say, good music today is cheap, can be hit over and over with satisfaction (given a break now and then), and we don’t have to rub elbows with dodgy people to acquire it.
In ancient times I would have had to buy all twelve of Mono Inc.’s albums to squeeze everything I want out of them, which in this band’s case would never have happened because I still haven’t found a better album than this one here,
Together Till the End. I’ll pick this one up eventually to support the band, but so far I've only found one or two hits max on the rest of Mono Inc.’s albums, so they'll have to sit on my “stream-only” shelf for now. Maybe if I get enough time away from their discography I’ll change my mind, because some of the music on this one is wonderful. And far more worthwhile than any numbing or stimulating white powder.
Well, except for caffeine. I don't think I'll even
try to give that one up again. Fuuuuuuck
that.
