Encrusted with blizzarding tremolo, gusts of dishevelled orchestra and tumultuous drumskin uproar, here we've a bona fide typhoon of emotions; textures; moods overwhelming enough to sweep away every last thought from the entirety of your brain, as its every lobe unites in attempting to process what is an unfathomably competent, and with it incomprehensibly complex record. It's thoroughly devastating from start through finish, in short. It's overall effect is quite that simple.
Immediately upping the overtly emotional whelming, and with it the ante is opener Legend. Recently employed to soundtrack Evosia Studios' A Journey Through Iceland – a striking geographical overview of the island's glaciers, geysers, and myriad wonders composed by extolled naturist, filmmaker, and Physician of Traditional Chinese Medicine Henry Jun Wah Lee – it's widescreen, high-definition grandiosity to have The Vapors turning Japanese all over again. It is the most openly affecting soundtrack condensed down into twelve minutes that oscillate mutedly between crisp minimalism and bombastic majesty, and it inundates the senses in a manner music is rarely capable of.
Indeed, much is made of the inability of recent generations to orchestrate works comparable in complexity to those of the great composers of, say, the Romantic epoch. Yet what with this being the quartet's sixth studio full-length, it's perhaps that we've purely not been scouring diligently enough for these supernal kinds of sound. Sincerely, I feel somewhat dismayed to have only recently allowed myself to be sheerly engulfed by that which MONO construct, for here we've an album to radically alter, and with that enhance any perception of any which music – antiquated or actual. Nostalgia plays off a blistering loud/ quiet dynamic to blow limbs straight off of sockets, its middle refrains conducting a fizzling spark of electrifying vigour whilst the faintly lugubrious, oneiric hush of Dream Odyssey calls to mind rather more traditional tones. Not of Osaka's Boredoms nor Tokyo's Boris (although MONO here singularly better both in ultimate raw power), nor of course overelaborate virtuoso types Miyavi and Hizaki but of unknown forefathers and, to put it a little more precisely, the Muji-clean atmospherics of Susumu Yokota at their most organic. That'll be both in times of yet to be photographically captured cherry blossom and in times of cherished blogs addled with GIFs of said bloom gently swaying in Kakunodate breeze, then.
However such correlations ultimately feel rather futile, given the indomitable stature of For My Parents. Unseen Harbour rattles with momentous buzz – a thick phalanx of wasp vying for global supremacy, whilst A Quiet Place (Together We Go) exudes the aura of an Asiatic Godspeed mourning the barren lands of the globe after the insects prevail. Amidst its swelling magnificence though, somehow, you can feel every timorous reverberation; every jitter of quivering plectrum upon tightly wound nickel. Thereby beautiful in both its ceremonially overblown moments and those of quite disquieting intimacy, despite the record being intended to serve "as a gift from child to parent" it is quite irrefutably the greatest of gifts from they to us. And just as such familial affection remains immutable over time, I sense that all fondness felt for this mesmeric LP shall remain steadfast as the world wears on. Thus hailing from those mystifying isles of all things vinegary and video game, if For My Parents pertains to the swooping melodrama of that perspiration-eking final duel to Shigeru Miyamoto's nonpareil Ocarina of Time then overall it chimes to a darayaki-sweet sound. A spellbinding fusion, it's one to take to the grave and beyond into Yomi-no-kuni.
