Hymn To The Immortal Wind

Post-rock. When done properly (Godspeed You Black Emperor!) it's one of the most viscerally thrilling genres about, and even the most slavish adherents to the quiet, loud, louder, LOUDEST formula still have a fair chance at making your hair stand on end (Explosions In The Sky). When it goes wrong, however, we get Hymn To The Immortal Wind, an album so ludicrously self-consciously EPIC it makes November Rain sound like a fucking Ramones song. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but it appears the once solid Japanese post-rock lot decided they seriously needed to up the ante after 10 years, which basically means adding dodgy-film-score strings to everything and making the climaxes so massive they could cause whiplash in the unprepared. It's Celine Dion for hipsters, basically, and at least Celine Dion doesn't make her songs go on for 10 freaking minutes each time. Each song on Hymn To The Immortal Wind follows the exact same formula. There's always a promising opening, usually with a fairly effective guitar part. But then the strings come in, the guitars go all loud and shimmery, and before you know it I'm trapped in every scene from a low-quality RPG in which the hero's village is burnt to the ground. Except it happens again and again and again for 70 minutes, in true Groundhog Day fashion. Yes, Explosions In The Sky have made a name for themselves by stringing climaxes together in a similar fashion, but there's something charmingly unpretentious about the way they do it, perhaps due to their relatively bare-bones set-up, post-rock that cuts through all the bullshit to deliver the goods. Mono, on the other, hand, are so heavy-handed they may as well be wearing leaden boxing gloves. Post-rock can only succeed when it feels completely and utterly natural, and Hymn To The Immortal Wind often sounds so forced I'm not completely certain it's not an elaborate piece of satire mocking post-rock conventions. Each crescendo comes in with thudding predictability, like the key change in a power ballad. And like said key change it comes off as nothing more than an exercise in emotional manipulation, because it's really bloody dramatic, yeh? Maybe I'm being overly harsh on Hymn To The Immortal Wind, but it's a shame this is getting raved about when I'm sure there's so much more worthwhile post-rock. Serious music fans generally seem to spot fraudulent tripe a mile off, so how Mono have pulled the wool over everyone's eyes with this is beyond me. Any complaint levelled at say, U2 could just as easily be levelled at this, and at least Bono and company don't load their music with orchestral flourishes so trite they could take down an elephant at twenty paces. For the entire duration of Hymn To The Immortal Wind, Mono are waving their hands and shouting “look at us! Look how EPIC we can be!”. I'll throw some points it's way because there's some decent stuff here, when the band aren't smacking you over the head. But for the most part I'm afraid this comes off as nothing more than post-rock for those who are a bit dim.