Mono

Theyr'e comin' to play at the Plink Plonk fest in my hometown this Friday.
So I'm listening to their Under The Pipal Tree CD (2001, Tzadik) right now... Mmm, I was kinda friendly pre-dispositioned and everything, but. Six tracks in, I wouldn't say they have any edge really on, say, Explosions In The Sky (of which I'm not too huge a fan anyway).
Will listen to the 2006 You Are There soon. Wonderin' whether that'll sound any different at all.

Put on a very good show at Terrastock, made Elvis Telecom an instant believer.

Well I do hope Mono'll be great live, yeh.

(P.S. Ned -- some of the organisers of teh fest that brings Mono here used to be in that Bizarre band once :) And Bizarre have just recently put out their café de flor on CD, at long last)

the other mono albums are better than Pipal

I like them, they're more subtle than other bands you might compare them with. More like Stars of the Lid.

except super fucking loud. i saw them open up for high on fire once and there was not much of an energy difference. at that terrastock show ned's talking about you could hear the drummer far out into the field the dude hits so hard

Kinda tempting, this:

http://lepoissonrouge.inticketing.com/evinfo.php?eventid=30896

They just opened a site for their new album, tourdates, etc:
http://www.mono-jpn.com/e/index.html

and about that one show:
http://www.mono-jpn.com/e/news/2009/0101_2.html

new track on myspace

I pretty much stopped buying new instrumental post-rock, but I picked Hymn to the Immortal Wind up this morning on a whim cuz it was cheap and used. Can't listen properly at work, gotta crank it at home.

It's great. Still waiting on my Mono vinyl package from TRL.

it's good for a rainy drive home. really killing the reverb/tremolo picking thing. they are also the most adorable post-rock band, so there's that.

They don't have many tricks in their bag, but damn do they make it work....at this point I'll take them over EITS and (recent) Mogwai

worth seeing live? most post-rock is so boring to me it makes me wanna fall asleep (EITS) but I've enjoyed Mogwai shows. (I've never really listened to Mono either)

Mono are great but never seen them live

Seen them once, probably for the red/white/blue album tour, thought their onstage antics were overly rehearsed. "Kidnapper Bell" still ruled, though.

onstage antics, eh?

Antics is the wrong word -- some trivial, affected histrionics from the guitarist, kind of came off as forced.

I saw them back in April and I thought they were fantastic. Didn't find the guitarist's onstage behaviour forced at all, it just seemed like a natural outgrowth of the music.

Yeah, don't let me stop you from seeing them. I might go myself!