|
Although Low Pining is the debut album from the Monahans, and the group only announced itself last year, the band is actually a familiar fixture to Austin music as its alter-ego Milton Mapes. Since transplanting (hopefully temporarily) to California, Greg Vanderpool and gang shifted to a bigger guitar sound, though the elements of cinematic grandiosity that define the new project were always equally at play in Milton Mapes as well. With Low Pining, however, the group is able to let that impulse expand even more, while also maintaining the often haunting and desolate pull of their earlier work.
The Monahans originated the 10 songs as instrumental pieces with their touchstone seeming to be the textured guitar anthems of the Eighties. “Traveling Song,” especially, would settle well alongside U2’s War or even The Joshua Tree, slowly building as the guitar jolts in and then swells into a blistering, scratchy solo. Likewise, “Undiscovered” drives pounding drums against the tight, mellow harmonies that prove the added effectiveness of vocals, the layered chorus ringing out, “Undiscovered, commonplace, quiet, tranquil and alive, Rolling lands laid out like a linen, No transgressions under the mud, See it all so concise and vivid, See night falling where we set fire.” The lines mirror the Monahans blanketed tranquility that still erupts from a deep, buried well in gentle surges, Vanderpool’s voice maintaining a calm repose that amplifies outward into expansive openness.
The dark alt. folk tinge of Milton Mapes remains prominent with the Monahans as well, and shades of Centro-matic darkening the edges of the album. The steel guitar of the exquisitely dire “When You’re Down” longingly chimes behind Vanderpool’s rough vocals paired perfectly with the Cowboy Junkie’s Margot Timmins, evoking that group’s somnambulant sound across lines like “Checking out. Signing off. Race away with the promise of another summer.” The feel of a reflective autumn descending haunts the song, missed opportunities and regrets settling into a way of life. The banjo accentuating the REM-inflected title track also retains a roots backdrop while the guitars push towards hallucinatory heights.
Throughout Low Pining, a thematic balance of fire flickers against the expanse of ocean. The stark “Blind Tide Sails and Weather Vane Hearts” watches “the Arcadia burning” through a smoky distortion while “Along My Shores” questions “What pulled you out of the burning house and spoke to you along the road? Should we stop it in its tracks, to contemplate the reasons?” But even as the latter song insists, “I just want feel the sand washing over my hands, Put away the world demands, to drift along on my shores,” the ocean offers no solace to the flame. Rather, both encapsulate a bleak ruin and void where music swims into the vacuum of almost static noise, lonesome in its inward redirection and epitomized in the almost-twelve minute instrumental closer aptly titled “Dissonance.” In confronting or even succumbing to that dissonance, however, Low Pining suggests that in the incomprehensible lies at least the opportunity for awareness, as in “The Answer to All Our Prayers”: “Oh great disorientation�The scars of home our navigation, Open out to our great withdrawal from the world, Wrapped in reverie and shadowland,” Vanderpool sings, concluding that “You miss it when you’re seeking, All the while it was everywhere, A reconciliation, The answer to all our prayers.” This is as close as the Monahans approach to a philosophical resolve in the face of the grim landscape they’ve (de)constructed, but the beauty of Low Pining lies not in its solutions or answers, but instead in its embracing of the ruin as an opportunity to reflect, and begin again. Just as U2 attempts to escape history and cultural definition in “The Streets Have No Names,” so too do the Monahans dramatically demolish everything with a poetic pull to leave at least a hope of rebuilding something different, something more beautiful.
Mp3 from Low Pining:
Undiscovered
Websites:
www.monahans.net
Myspace
