Mono Gig

Magazines like Guitar Player monthly and Total Guitar have always puzzled me a bit. In a way you could possibly equate their fetishising of guitars with the way people buy Car Monthly and Max Power, but really is a Band or an artist not the car, and the guitar just a small part of a greater whole? Are there magazines like Tyre Enthusiast? Brake Light Specialist? Classic Hub Cap Buyer?

Perhaps I'm just being narrow minded. Last night I was faced with a whole room of the type of people who buy these magazines, as I went to a Mono gig, a japanese post-rock band. I had gone to watch them at Scala in the hope that they would be a kind of new version of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the legendary Canadian band, who no longer tour, or make albums.

Their music is a mixture of amazing percussion, with a lot of intricate and powerful guitar work from their three guitarists, building to crashing crescendos, and no vocalist in sight. Its the kind of majestic thing you could score a film with, or as Sigur Ros music has done in the past, a BBC Nature Documentary series. The only problem with this type of music and its drawn out atmospheric nature is that in performance, it needs to be supplemented by either a wealth of different instrumentation, a top notch light show, or hugely charismatic performers with real stage presence. Not two comatose guitarists sitting on stools and a third, female guitarist drugglily swaying along.

The people who had crowded to the front of the stage (an hour an half before anything even started) seemed to absolutely love watching the top strumming action that was happening before them, and were gasping in awe at the classiest fingering since Lady Chatterleys Lover (sorry I couldn’t resist.)

After opening with their latest single, Ashes in the Snow, which is genuinely brilliant and exhilarating, everything kind of took on a formulaic tone, and while good, wasn’t enough to really enliven the mood too much. On the plus side, their drummer was probably worth the price of admission, if only he wasn’t resigned to sitting at the back of the stage, whilst his less active band mates were pushed to the front. I guess Total Guitar has higher sales figures than Drum World.