I love a mystery. Maybe it’s a British thing. Maybe it isn’t but it feels like mysteries are in our blood. The moment I find something, be it a film, book, TV show, or band, I have to find out more about it. It takes over me like a mania. When I’ve found out all I can I’m satisfied. At the time of this review, there isn’t much about MONSTRE. All I can glean is they are a post-rock trio from Amiens, France. That’s it. It’s refreshing that in a world where the answer to almost everything is at the tip of our fingers the band would leave so much unknown.
‘Re Bonjour’ opens with swirling atmospherics before a haunting, almost folk sounding, riff emerges. Like a figure through the mist/fog in a film noir. This builds until just before the halfway mark when the rest of the band join in and the song comes to life with an explosion of sound and movement. It follows on this path until the outro when all is stripped away apart from some sinewy feedback and those swirling atmospherics. This is classic post-rock. Nice and quiet. Then nice and loud. It tells you everything you need to know about MONSTRE. They love hypnotic riffs. Not singing and bringing it all together to make an almighty racket before dropping it all down again. ‘Dyatlov Pass’ follows on in the ether of ‘Re Bonjour’. Here MONSTRE elongate things a bit, whilst keeping them a bit more subdued. It never reaches the raging peaks of ‘Re Bonjour’ but it does feature the same levels of intensity. Here MONSTRE show that less can be more. The music is just as frenetic. Especially the final third, where the riff has a hypnotic majesty to it. ‘Blue Velvet’ is one of the standout moments on the album. Some of the guitar riffs are jazzier than you expect on a post-rock release. They’re abstract and work incredibly well with the pummelling drums, throbbing bass and keyboards. About two thirds through the tone changes and a more conventional sound emerges. Its pretty good, but it would have been more fun to have that abstract sound play throughout. The standout track is ‘Bas Relief’. Kicking off with a riff reminiscent of the score to the shower scene in Psycho. The momentum builds before it all starts to kick off around the halfway mark. From then on MONSTRE move into another gear and are away. It’s testament to their sequencing skills that they kept a song of this power until the end. Many bands would have put it in the middle and used it as a centrepiece of the album, but MONSTRE waited patiently and put it at the end so the song, and album, would benefit from it.
What MONSTRE do really well on I is they subvert the post-rock formula enough to keep themselves interested and us on our toes. Just when you have it figured out they do a “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and change the questions when we have the answers. And the album benefits from it. Just because it starts with clean guitars and open chords, as on ‘Odd Species’, doesn’t mean that’s how it’ll end. This is an album to play on loop and get lost in. The melodies, and rhythms, are labyrinthic. They twist and turn constantly making us disoriented and giddy. Once we’re in this state MONSTRE unleash the big guns and hit us with some killer melodies. The one thing I hope for the future is that MONSTRE keep doing what they’re doing, as it works, and they keep themselves hidden and never reveal who they are, as its all part of the package. They is some kind of monster alright!
