Requiem for Hell Mono

• 1 Death in Rebirth 08:05
• 2 Stellar 04:58
• 3 Requiem for Hell 17:48
• 4 Ely's Heartbeat 08:27
• 5 The Last Scene 06:43
• Total Runtime 46:01

Info for Requiem for Hell

MONO are a band driven by intangible conflicts. Their albums have found inspiration in the inescapable coexistence of love and loss, faith and hopelessness, light and darkness. Fittingly, their new album, Requiem For Hell, incorporates all of those conflicts into the one universal inevitability in life: Birth, and death.

Requiem For Hell finds MONO returning to longtime friend and collaborator, Steve Albini. After MONO and Albini's band, Shellac, toured Japan together last year, they realized how much they missed the (often wordless) creative dialogue they shared during the making of many of their most memorable albums – beginning with Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky... (2004) and culminating with Hymn To Immortal Wind (2009). The rebirth of the Albini collaboration for Requiem For Hell also coincided with the birth of a close friend's first child, whose actual in utero heartbeat serves as the foundation for the aptly named "Ely's Heartbeat." For MONO, it all felt so right, so inevitable.

Requiem For Hell is undeniably heavier and scarier than most of MONO's output to this point – hear the dizzying 18- minute title track for example – but it also carries some of their most sublime moments. This dichotomy is how one band’s obsession with conflict has manifested itself into one of underground music's simultaneously quietest and loudest catalogs.

"Since the late 1990s, Japan's Mono have stubbornly adhered to post-rock's basic aesthetics. Though they've experimented with strings, keyboards, and various sounds and textures, all of their albums bear an unmistakable signature that combines formulaic dynamic strategies with wide tonal palettes and intimate, compressed melodic structures. In Mono's music, rock is a way of examining and expressing emotional, psychological, and spiritual states. Requiem for Hell is the quartet's ninth album. It's a reunion with Steve Albini, their behind-the-boards collaborator from 2004's Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky through 2009's Hymn to the Immortal Wind.

This is a back to basics affair, an attempt to sum up everywhere Mono has been, but it's also their noisiest record ever. Opener "Death in Rebirth" is a companion piece to "Death and Reverse," their half of 2015's Transcendental split with Ocean. It picks up where the earlier cut left off. Takaakira Goto's and Hideki Suematsu's guitars introduce a minimal riff. Drummer Yasunori Takada and bassist Tamaki Kunishi commence a hypnotic, martial vamp in response. Ever increasing guitar layers get pasted onto the mix until it bleeds red with squalling distortion and feedback -- without forsaking an irresistible harmonic center. The centerpiece is the set's 17-plus-minute epic title track. Goto's sad guitar line is at the fore, while a softly played glockenspiel and ambient sound hover in the backdrop. Takada enters five minutes in accompanied by bassist Kunishi and Suematsu. The vamp expands and the force increases in density until there's nowhere left to go but silence. Quiet sounds and echoes emerge from the emptiness, gradually introducing guitars and drums. The band purposefully erects a wall of overdriven shoegaze -- inspired, all but unhinged noise that eventually destroys itself in a howling wall of metal aggression. "Ely’s Heartbeat" commences as a lullaby with six circular cascading notes. Processional drumming enters and the harmonic center grows. Gorgeous guitar tonalities engage chamber strings and piano. Closer "The Last Scene," with its piano and guitar interplay, is, in its intro, nearly a blues. Drums accentuate that notion, but before long, additional guitars carve out a new foundation and blurred strings frame it all as a compressed lyric center that heightens the emotional impact before peeling away and whispering to a close. Requiem for Hell doesn't offer anything "new," and it doesn't try to. This album brings together the various musical notions and conflicting emotions expressed in Mono's music from previous outings and delivers them as a complex but unified whole. It's intimate and powerful and, at 48 minutes, it's also a perfect length. Requiem for Hell is simultaneously a perfect introduction to and summation of Mono as a band." (Thom Jurek, AMG)

Mono

Mono
The Tokyo, Japan based 4-piece Instrumental Rock band MONO was originally formed in 1999. Their unique approach of blending orchestral arrangements and shoegaze guitar noise in their music has been held in extremely high regard; so much so, that the band’s musicianship can no longer be sustained by Rock music alone and was praised by British Musical Magazine NME as "This is music for the Gods". One of the most monumental live memories of the band was a special set of shows with a 23-piece orchestra in New York, Tokyo, London and Melbourne.

Their annual world tour consists of around 150 shows. The band has now visited over 55 countries and proudly holds the title of being one of the most internationally successful bands in Japan. Among Rock music critics and fans, they are revered as one of the best live bands in Rock.

After releasing 10 successful albums including a live album with an orchestra in New York, the band received the highly regarded award "The Marshall Hawkins Awards: Best Musical Score - Featurette" from the Idyllwild International Festival of Cinema for their collaborative short film "Where We Begin" in 2015.

In 2016, the band recorded their 9th album "Requiem For Hell" with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio, Chicago which was released worldwide on Oct 14, 2016.

In June 2018, the band will headline alongside such bands as My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails, Mogwai and Deftones at London's Meltdown Festival, curated by Robert Smith of The Cure.

This album contains no booklet.