Early post-rock bands like Bark Psychosis, Seefeel and Tortoise were primarily interested in texture and abstraction rather than the relentless swells and releases, the quiet lulls and wave-like crescendos that have become de rigueur for the modern genre.
Something changed around the turn of the millennium. The new wave of post-rock, including bands like Explosions In The Sky, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, This Will Destroy You and numerous others gutted the genre’s very-nineties blurring of sentiments and deconstructed musicality, replacing them with direct emotional trajectories and earnest melodies. The post-9/11 world was a “cold, dead place” to quote EITS, one that demanded simpler answers, even if none were easily forthcoming.
Post-rock 2.0 is bound up in the complications of this era, and in possession of a sonic palette that clearly reflects its profound melancholy. This also explains why the genre’s popularity has dipped and waned so much since this heyday. Bands like 65daysofstatic and Maybeshewill briefly infused the sound with electronic glitches but, as a whole, contemporary post-rock still sounds much like the melodramatic, cinematic mode of this 00’s golden age.
Though Tokyo’s MONO have made few alterations to this genre formula across their twenty-two year-long career; Pilgrimage Of The Soul is notable for some key tonal differences. This newest album, their fourteenth full-length, was recorded in August 2020 in Chicago with frequent collaborator Steve Albini. Its production in the broiling, deeply confused summer of last year lends a new sense of sociopolitical subtext to Pilgrimage Of The Soul, replacing the melancholia of the neoliberal post-9/11 years with a cathartic release of post-lockdown, post-Trump, post-truth anguish.
Though the entirety of Pilgrimage Of The Soul is unmistakably MONO, it contains moments that are amongst their most urgent. The opening two tracks in particular are especially driving. ‘Riptide’ is straight-up headbang-able, opening the album in an aptly earth-shattering fashion, while the second half of following track ‘Imperfect Things’ is downright groovy, lead by a disco drum beat and rumbling bass. The overall tone remains one of glorious transcendence, and the guitars still possess the same effects-heavy viscosity, but the instrumentation makes for a nice change of pace for those familiar with MONO’s long-running shtick.
Other tracks like the twelve-minute epic ‘Hold Infinity In The Palm Of Your Hand’ and the brittle ‘Innocence’ are much more familiar, however, what makes Pilgrimage Of The Soul distinctive within Mono’s sprawling assemblage is the aforementioned sense of urgency. Even the most familiar moments feel less blurry, less impressionistic than so much of the band’s previous work. A track like ‘Innocence’ would once have been slower, more patient, its outlines less defined. Here it bursts with an immediacy that makes for a clearer, less methodical and ultimately very engaging listen.
Everything about Pilgrimage Of The Soul smacks of this urgent approach. The tracks enter and exit just that bit quicker than so much of MONO’s previous ponderous epics. There’s less violins and orchestration, almost none in fact. It all feels highly cathartic, as though, post-lockdown, in that crazy summer when it felt like the world was ending, MONO were desperate to express themselves, and in the process cut an album that is all the more effective for its seemingly-hurried nature.
Post-rock 2.0’s dramatic sensibilities appear to make a great fit for our wild, unpredictable new world. Its inherent sense of yearning matches our collective grief at the state of the current social landscape, while its linearity and length makes for a refreshing palette cleanser in a world defined by complexity and brevity. Who knows, perhaps the genre is exactly what this cold, dead place needs.