The concert represented on
Beyond the Past: Live in London with the Platinum Anniversary Orchestra occurred at the Barbican Centre in December 2019 in celebration of
Mono's 20th birthday. The Japanese power trio invited a formidable cast of show openers that included fellow Japanese rock icons
Boris and
Envy, and French post-black metal legends
Alcest. England's fine death-gospel singer/songwriter
A.A. Williams and London-based experimental cellist
Jo Quail also perform with the band on select tracks.
Mono fire on all cylinders here. The wispy, ethereal atmospherics of "God Bless" are quickly transplanted by the beauty and raw force at work in the swirling "After You Comes the Flood." "Breathe" is introduced by brooding, mournful low strings and keyboards. It begins to brighten as bassist
Tamaki Kunishi starts to sing; she is joined by slivers of shard-like guitar and low rumbling percussion. A lone fingerpicked electric six-string delivers the familiar guitar vamp signaling the arrival of "Nowhere, Now Here" in the set list. Very gradually, it expands in circular fashion past elliptical strings, lilting guitar blues, droning reeds, and tender strings. They add a subtle shade and spiny ballast as the music leaves its body to enter the overblown sonic maelstrom. In "Dream Odyssey," tinkling bells, celeste, and a droning organ whisper into the frame before piano, drums, and bass buoy the languid melody. When the strings and guitars begin their harmonic exchange, digitally delayed guitars ratchet up the drama, though the tune remains a lilting processional. And so it flows.
Mono's commanding mix of dynamics, texture, and harmony is peerless. On "Meet Us Where the Night Ends," they add just a hint of sampled choral voices that reflect the sacred; on "Halcyon," they move into a blissed-out drift that evokes being under the drug's influence. "Ashes in the Snow" offers an uninsistent reverence and hushed spirituality that becomes luminous as layers of spectral overtones and crushing distortion and feedback reveal the full impact of the track's emotional unraveling.
Williams reprises her studio collaboration with
Mono on the ballad "Exit in Darkness," her lonesome, aching vocal sounds set forever in sorrow's amber.
Mono's
Beyond the Past: Live in London ends some two hours after it began with "COM," a Gothic waltz that transmogrifies into dissonant improv, unrestrained power electronics, and chaotic brute force.
Mono left their audience exhausted and enthusiastic (as they more than likely were themselves). They left it all -- the beautiful and hideous, the sad and haunted, the ferocious and ecstatic -- on the Barbican stage. Add in the deluxe packaging that includes an obsessively detailed 40-page photo book, and what you have is not only the band's definitive live document, but also a consummate best-of. ~ Thom Jurek
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