Ticket Giveaway Week - The First Offering is Mono
Tuesday, October 6, 2009 I am traveling in Japan this week, and anxiously awaiting the arrival of my first typhoon. It's been lightly raining for days, nicely offsetting the enhanced humidity. But just a few drops is enough for every resident of this city to bring out their umbrellas. In Japanese style, they even give you what amounts to an umbrella condom at storefronts to prevent you from dripping water within. But the calm sea of umbrellas will soon be disrupted by torrential winds, and I plan to spend a few hours watching the streets become a parasol graveyard. There will be some dramatic deaths, to be sure. This is not a people that gives in easily.
Enough about dreaming for chaos. I've decided to use this week away from the City of Devils to unload free tickets we have accumulated over the last couple of weeks. Some of these shows are not metal, so this excercise shall teach us a bit about the musical diversity of our readership. But all of these bands are good, and tend to be their best on the stage. That's our basic test.
Up first, all the way from the beautiful country in which I presently type, is MONO. They will be playing songs from their fifth album, Hymn to the Immortal Wind, at the El Rey on October 13th. That record, along with two others, was made with Steve Albini who the band describes as "the greatest sound engineer for capturing a band’s raw emotion on tape." I know there's much debate out there about Mr. Albini's skills, but his discography tends to back up that point. Any rock band that wants to make an analog recording with a chamber orchestra should have him on their short list. And, yeah, Mono is post-rock, which for our purposes means they make music for a time when words no longer matter. I just made that up. But I do like how their label describes the evolution of their music:
While Hymn continues to mine the cinematic drama inherent in all of MONO's music, the dynamic shifts now come more from dark-to-light instead of quiet-to-loud.
Click Pic for Tix
If you're getting restless waiting for the new RED SPAROWES record, spending an evening with MONO may temporarily relieve the anxiety. Contact us here or at thecityofdevils@gmail.com to enter the contest.
Reader Comments (1)
I wish I could go to this, I'm so disappointed I'll have to miss it