Mono's fifth, Steve Albini produced, album only contains seven tracks, but you probably shouldn't feel that you're not getting "value for money". Not only because five of those seven ('Ashes In The Snow', 'Burial At Sea' 'Pure As Snow (Trails Of The Winter Storm)', 'The Battle To Heaven' and 'Everlasting Light') clock in at over ten minutes each, but also because the album comes as such a pleasingly put-together package, comprising not only the music itself, but also some lovely artwork for each track (by Esteban Rey) and an accompanying chapter of a short story (by Heeya So).Now I'm normally a sucker for this kind of thing, but the integrated music/art/story became, in fact, my main obstacle to wholehearted enjoyment of this album.In the first place, this kind of extremely cinematic post-rock would normally be expected to evoke all kinds of images and imaginings in the listener, but by producing a ready-made story to accompany it then this pleasure has been short-circuited and taken out of the listener's control. More importantly, I found that despite being told on the Mono website that each of these (the stories, music and artwork) was "inspired by the other", when I diligently set myself the task of reading each track's accompanying words while listening to the music, I found it in most cases very hard to see the connection. This actually ended up serving more as a distraction from the music itself than (as was presumably the intention) adding interest and depth to the experience. In 'Burial At Sea', for example, the accompanying part of the story includes a violent description of a beating that "the boy" (the two central characters are a male and a female, who are not named) takes:"a man began to kick the boy as if he was nothing but a stump in the ground (...) he could only hear the sound of his flesh against the man's fists and feet." When listening to the music I waited, expecting a very obviously violent and visceral interlude to represent this scene, but I couldn't make out any part of the track that seemed to fit such extremity of action. Indeed, as the album went on, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that any one of these tracks could have been matched up with any one of the story chapters at random, without any of them seeming jarringly out of place, or notably perfect a fit. This was a big letdown, since - like I said - I really respect and appreciate the ambition behind this kind of attempt to widen the scope of an album's meaning.The music has been created, we are told, using the largest chamber orchestra the band has ever enlisted, and the result of this is a sound that is extremely cinematic. The quiet-to-loud-to-quiet-again trajectory is followed on nearly every track, to the point where it becomes predictable and so loses the sense of drama that it is intended to convey. The stringed instrumentation also veers towards the unpalatably syrupy on a couple of occasions, in 'Ashes In The Snow' and 'Follow The Map' in particular.There are other moments where - if you didn't know that it was a cool and credible post-rock band - you would almost think you were listening to piped music in a hotel lobby; most markedly in the corny and cheesy 'Pure As Snow' (which also features a twanging guitar sound that make me thing of The Shadows, lord help us), but also in parts of 'Burial At Sea' and 'The Battle To Heaven'.Combine all of the above with the further problem that nearly all of the tracks are actually pretty similar - not only in the peaks and troughs of intensity and volume (as already discussed), but also in instrumentation and general mood - and what remains is actually a pretty disappointing whole, albeit a beautifully packaged, illustrated and annotated one. 61%Mono on Myspace