Album Review: Monolord, Your Time to Shine
The difficulty in talking about Monolord at this point is doing so in non-superlative terms. Your Time to Shine is a tale of Monolord and Monolord. There is Monolord, the Gothenburg trio whose riff worship across now-five full-lengths has cast an influential net that spans every continent they’ve touched on tour and then some. The three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Thomas V. Jäger, bassist Mika Häkki and drummer/engineer Esben Willems, who since their 2014 debut, Empress Rising (discussed here) have done nothing other than dominate the heavy underground, tonally and in work ethic. Monolord the beast. With a sound that seems infinitely imitable — as the lumbering hordes in their significant shadow prove — but unable to be reproduced verbatim.
Your Time to Shine is a tale of this Monolord. With Häkki‘s altar-worthy bass tone and the immediate stomp of Willems‘ drums at their foundation, from the very outset of opener “The Weary,” Monolord offer a clarion to the converted and those who might not know yet they’re ready to be indoctrinated. These slams — they need no context. Do you need to know that 2019’s fourth LP, No Comfort (review here) — also their first for Relapse Records after beginning their career with RidingEasy — was the best album released that year? Nope. By the time Jäger is swagger-riffing through the measure-breaks in the first verse of “The Weary,” it couldn’t matter less. If you’ve never heard Monolord, there is zero barrier to getting on board with Your Time to Shine, and the band’s non-aggro heft only makes them more accessible to a broader audience sphere.
This Monolord runs rampant through the urgent nod of “To Each Their Own,” with rips through a slow-motion triumph in its late-stage lead guitar after crafting a seven-plus-minute progression that leaves one aching to hear it at full-venue volume, tempo trades between pummel and plod after the quiet beginning leads to the first surge executed with fluidity that’s immersive enough to fucking drown in. Not just repetitive, not just heavy, but telling of the other Monolord throughout Your Time to Shine. That second Monolord alluded to earlier, which is waiting in the background to more fully reveal itself after the outright crush of “I’ll Be Damned,” a centerpiece that sets its hook as much in its main riff as its subsequent chorus.
Airy guitar fills out the midsection after a chugging verse opens to the chorus — a simple recitation of the title, teased instrumentally the first time, delivered in full the second — taking the primitivism that so many identify as crucial to who Monolord are and running with it, not repeating past accomplishments or forgetting them but casting a familiar and welcome revelry. The solo winds back to the chorus, that central riff builds out through a finish and sudden stop — the feeling structured, composed, masterful in its way. The superlative Monolord writing pieces they knew they’d be able to take on stage, wherever, whenever. They just might be damned. So might we all if they keep opening chasms as gargantuan as they do here.
Which is where that other Monolord begins its tale. Because Your Time to Shine isn’t just the celebration of impact that the double-kick-and-riff combo after the six-minute mark of “I’ll Be Damned” represents. It’s not just “The Weary.” It’s also the weariness. Side B departs in structure and form from the album’s first three tracks, bringing “Your Time to Shine” (10:40) and “The Siren of Yersinia” (9:24), as two longer-form pieces that are nearly an album unto themselves and whose intentions go beyond what the band have done before in terms of atmosphere and depiction of mood. The title-track is laced with bitter irony, as sad in its procession as it is cavernous in its space, and in its minimalist stretch that ends its second half, it willfully pulls away from the expectation of who Monolord are and what they’ve done to this point in their tenure, pushing outward even from No Comfort in its readiness to be and do something else.
They answer this with a more immediate shove on “The Siren of Yersinia,” but by the time the closer’s first minute is done, it’s being lead by a drifting, standalone guitar and Jäger‘s far-off vocals, making use of the emptiness that might otherwise be filled by the onslaught of a piece like “To Each Their Own.” There’s a hit right around three minutes in and a heavier roll ensues as Häkki and Willems rejoin, but the prevailing sensibility is as close as I’ve ever heard Monolord come to classic-style doom, even amid the Sabbathian foundation of their sound or their earlier Electric Wizard influence. Yersinia, incidentally, is a parasite. A tempo shift returns some bookending cowbell or woodblock from “The Weary,” and even as the band stomp and crash their way to the song and album’s end, the underlying mood is maintained.
This Monolord is the one able to say they feel it too. The anxious uncertainty. The restlessness. The feeling of loss that comes with having lived through this time. If the first half of Your Time to Shine is a reminder of the glories of such weighted aural impact, the second is the reminder of the world in which that impact is happening. No Comfort also took its title from its longest track, and in that and in other ways, Your Time to Shine is a consistent step forward following on from that album and the progression that began to make itself felt on 2017’s Rust (review here) after 2015’s Vænir (review here) affirmed the drive of the debut. But one of this collection’s chief accomplishments is its ability to bring together the two sides — the overwhelming assault and the identifiable expression. They make those sounds and then they use them to fucking say something.
It’s not just about heavy grooves and melodic vocals. Looking back, I’m not sure it ever was. And as much as Monolord are recognizable through that in the influence they’ve had, their work has never been broader than it is here or more refined. At 39 minutes, Your Time to Shine is the shortest album Monolord have ever done, and they did it at Willems‘ own Studio Berserk. Perhaps it is in finding the essence of who they are sound-wise, the Monolord and the Monolord, that they’ve become all the more essential and united in their purpose. See what I mean about the superlatives? Recommended.
Awesome review. Can’t wait to receive my crazy ass limited release with like a coloring book and coffee beans and signed grill or whatever.