[Monument of] Swords - Alpha Omega
The first thing to say about Alpha Omega, the new album by Canada's [Monument of] Swords is that I can't look at their band name and not think "Monument of S-Words." I don't know why.
The second thing to say about it is that this is the kind of CD you actually have to hold. It has a really cool hand-screened, chipboard cover which practically demands you to run your fingers across it.
Which leads me to my main point, this CD reminds me of the kind of cool, DIY CDs you used to see a lot a decade or so ago, but not so much today.
I'm not against the world shifting to digital music. There are a lot of good things about it (less waste, easier, faster, etc.). Having said that, the thing that you really do miss with digital music is the tactile experience of holding a piece of something that someone poured their heart into in your hands. Some records just have personality, and this is one of them.
When I was coming up I feel like I used to get CDs like this a lot. They weren't the best CDs in the world, nor the best recorded, but something about them just felt real right. You could tell that a lot of thought and energy went into them.
[Monument of] Swords is a pretty raw band. The recording is raw, the guitars are raw, the vocals are raw. They kind of sound like a band that would have a hand-screened, chipboard CD case, like they do. Like a cross between early His Hero is Gone, late-90s Florida hardcore, and contemporary sludge-core kind of stuff. There's a lot of earnest samples, harsh screaming, and pounding drumming.
The whole thing comes together in a kind of fun, messy, noisy jumble that really brought me back to when I could go see a touring band on a Tuesday night at the Fireside Bowl and there'd only be a handful of kids there and the band would play on the floor instead of the stage and they'd absolutely kill it and you'd buy their hand-screened t-shirt and homemade, home-recorded CD for $10 altogether and they'd be real friendly kids who knew that they probably weren't ever going to be the big band on the big label but didn't care because they were doing their band exactly how they wanted it to be done and, besides, they knew they fucking killed that night.
[Monument of] Swords is like that.
It actually kind of reminds of this band Meadowlark I saw. I'm not sure if anyone remembers them anymore but me and a few other people at the show. The above description fits Meadowlark to a T. They were this band that just kind of came from out of nowhere to play an awesome set one night at the Fireside. Their seven inch, which I picked up from them, was this home-recorded wall of noise that was a lot of fun. I still break it out sometimes. [Monument of] Swords is a band in the Meadowlark tradition.
I don't really experience much quite like that in 2009, but [Monument of] Swords are definitely the closest thing I've heard in a long time to it. If, like me, you came up listening to both hardcore and metal and still appreciate a little bit of that kind of 90s, DIY aesthetic, you should do yourself a favor and check this album out. Its noisy, passionate, and raw in all the right ways, and made me a little nostalgic for when I could get a physical, tangible CD or 7" with this much personality every week if I wanted to. It'll definitely be getting some spins from me this Summer.
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login or register to post comments Submitted by herry on Fri, 2010-07-30 11:49.