Music, they say, is universal, but that's always been a naively romantic notion-- it often doesn't even translate across countries that speak the same language. However, the Esperonto ideal does hold true in one exceptional case: climactic, noise-heavy post-rock. It's the rare genre where you find bands from locations as far-flung as Iceland (Sigur Rós), Texas (Explosions in the Sky), Quebec (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), Scotland (Mogwai), and Japan (Mono) cultivating international fanbases by doing pretty much the same thing: being very quiet, then being very loud (preferably, over the course of 15 minute songs). And though all of these bands deal in mostly instrumental terms, the extremities in which they operate rarely leave room for interpretation-- Sigur Rós even went so far as to spell it out for you on their T-shirts: "Avoid apocalypse, buy hope." But the question posed by Mono's fifth album is, how much hope can you buy before you max out your credit?
There's a conservatory-like studiousness to You Are There, each dramatic device and solemn guitar melody introduced with such delicate, resolute deliberation, you can practically hear the quartet flipping their sheet-music pages. Steve Albini's cavernous recordings lend the material an air of fear and uncertainty, but for all the reverberating guitar lines, thunderous timpani marches, and ungodly distortion piled upon each track, the songs only have two places to go: up and down-- sometimes at the exact same intervals. Both the 13-minute opener "The Flames Beyond the Cold Mountain" and the 15-minute "Yearning" begin as uniformly desolate, funereal elegies before hitting their seismic crash-endos around the seven-minute mark and lingering until every last ember has flamed out.
Mono's fuzz-pedal fireworks are impressive in their sheer volume and vigor, but there's rarely the sense the music is ever going to fall apart, steer off the rails, or even change pace; these emotional roller coasters stay within the legal speed limit and come with extra-secure seatbelts. Only closer "Moonlight" (also a 13-minute commitment) betrays any signs of loosening, with a limbering space-rock sway that climbs up the back half of Pink Floyd's "Echoes". Mono are generous enough to offset You Are There's four colossal tracks with a pair of serene, three-minute pieces (the glockenspieled lullaby "A Heart Has Asked for the Pleasure" and the string-sweetened piano pastorale "The Remains of the Day"), and even if these brief respites work better as bathroom breaks than stand-along songs, they're ultimately necessary: after an hour of getting your heartstrings tugged with such intense proficiency, You Are There starts to feel no less egregiously manipulative than hearing Celine belt out "My Heart Will Go On" for the thousandth time in a Vegas ballroom.
