Monstrance – S/T

Monstrance – S/T / 2007 Ape / 12 Tracks / http://www.apehouse.prevuz.com / Reviewed 24 June 2007

Two former members of XTC are in this act. Obviously, the band is linked to Andy Partridge, but former XTC keyboardist Barry Andrews is an integral part of this act. Andrews was in the band Shriekback with the third member of Monstrance, Martyn Baker. This is a two-CD set, and shows the love for experimental music showcased by all of the members of the band. Thus, the disc starts out with “I Lovely Cosmonaut”, and it does not have much in the way of overarching frameworks placed on it.

It takes quite a few minutes, until Monstrance gets into the second track (“Winterwerk”), before the band does something that more traditional fans of music will easily appreciate. If individuals are inculcated into the radical fringe of neo-classical music, with authors such as Penderecki and Glass, the music that Partridge et al create will be approachable. Individuals that want to hear “Dear God” will not hear anything that approximates that, but rather will have to sit down and seriously pander the entirety of the Monstrance double-disc album. There are pieces and parts of quite a few tracks on the set that individuals can hear the band uniting to provide something greater than their constituent parts, but there is much more often a call and response type of sound to the tracks here. While the compositions seem to find themselves on the more electronic side of things, the underlying structure present in a large amount of Monstrance tracks is much more natural and evolutionary. The arrangements are sparse throughout, but this does not mean that previous movements do not influence the more current movements.

The disc has a high amount of replay not only due to the fact that individuals are provided two discs, but rather that songs like “Priapple” are 16 minutes. This is a length that will cause individuals to listen through the track a number of times, in order to ensure that fans can understand how the first and second movements necessarily influenced later movements. Monstrance, coming from such an open and free-form set of compositions, could conceivably create a number of albums in the same vein without seeming played out in the least. This is not XTC, but Partridge has XTC to create music like that. Monstrance is its own thing, and fans of more experimental music will dig the compositions that are present on this two-disc set.

Top Tracks: Mig, Winterwerk

Rating: 6.5/10