Having established themselves as one of the most distinctive-- and difficult to categorize-- bands of the 21st century, post-rock group Mono have more or less been following their own muse for a number of years. On Holy Ground: NYC Live with the Wordless Music Orchestra, it takes them away from their usual home-away-from-home of Chicago (and the ministrations of their favorite producer, Steve Albini), and to New York for a lengthy and elaborately constructed live performance with the redundantly named Wordless Music Orchestra. This time out, the job of recording falls to Matt Bayles, who brings to his duties here the same meticulous determination to give every sound its own space, the way he did on Oceanic and Celestial for the late, lamented Isis. The album sounds fantastic, filling up all the room it's given; even the crowd noise comes through with a bright clarity that matches the emotional resonance of Mono's work.
The music itself-- mostly drawn from last year's Hymn to the Immortal Wind-- very much follows the stream Mono have been navigating since their inception. As early as 2001, they were incorporating strings into their sound, and their previous two albums featured, respectively, a string quartet and a chamber orchestra, so working with a full-fledged, complete orchestral arrangement must have seemed like a natural progression. The arrangements, mostly done by Wordless Music Orchestra conductor Jeffrey Milarsky and Mono guitarist Takaakira Goto, are written to take full advantage of the new range of instruments at the group's disposal. The treatment of the songs never seems tacked on, and Mono never makes the mistake of wasting orchestral resources on tacky string stings and other cheap flourishes.
Yet while Mono avoid the pomposity that often goes along with orchestral collaborations, Holy Ground is most effective when the arrangements are written to take full advantage of both the depth of the orchestra and the power of the rock band they surround. The first two tracks illustrate how good the pairing can be, as does the electrifying treatment of "Halcyon (Beautiful Days)"; all three maximize the potential of the concept by bringing Goto and Yoda's guitars and especially Yasunori Takada's increasingly underutilized drums to the fore and letting the orchestra support them. On other tracks, though, the cart is put so fully before the horse that it's difficult to distinguish what's happening from a manipulative film score. Mono have always been susceptible to overwrought emotion, but by bringing in so many instruments that are inextricably linked in our cultural receptors to specific feelings and moods, they risk becoming an unusually refined melancholy-moods outfit.
Holy Ground is also an extremely intense listening experience; at its end, the listener is, by design, emotionally drained. It's hard to imagine listening to it more than once in anything like a casual way. It comes with a DVD of the original live performance which is much more effective, since it conveys the entire work with the singular experiential power it was intended to have. They may shed some listeners as they define themselves down to an ever-purer expression, but there's no question that Mono is doing exactly what they want to do at this point in their career.
