Labels: Dim Mak
Review by: Alex Deller
Instrumental music is one tough cake to bake. The absence of dialogue splits the body down the middle and bares the bones for all to see, the make or break hinging on the ability to play the listener’s emotions with music alone, telling stories without words and letting the audience fill the blanks on their own. Too often this falls flat, easily rendered dull, flat or lifeless, but when it works the results can be fantastic.
From Monument To Masses thankfully fall into this latter category, using America post-9/11 as their muse and weaving a whole paranoid patchwork of restless discontent in just under fifty minutes. Epic in the subtlest of ways, eschewing the overwrought bush league symphonies of too many bands following the Mogwai/G!YBE trail, FMTM take a peripatetic approach to their music, recalling the likes of June of 44 or Fugazi with their ever-flowing, dub-laced grooves, scurrying chord patterns and chiming harmonics. The songs are accompanied by scattered electronic beats and tactically placed samples crackling out words from a half-century’s worth of revolutionaries, sounding like a radio slowly being tuned across frequencies, picking up faraway cries for help and calls to arms along the way.
The seven songs blend seamlessly together, an intricate ebb of shifts and ideas that will have you gazing starry-eyed at the palms of your hands one moment and checking worriedly over your shoulder the next. Utterly engrossing and quietly magnificent, “The Impossible Leap”¦’ is probably one of the best instrumental albums you’ll have heard in a long, long time.