Review Summary: The Monad of Creation is not so much music as it is a complete experience. This is doom metal, in its purest form.
Please, check your preconceived notions of what music is, and what it can amount to and achieve at the door. Do away with all genre stereotypes, anything that could interfere with your appreciation of music in its most elemental form. Only then will you be able to grasp what Mournful Congregation has achieved with The Monad of Creation.
In a world so unfortunately led by superficial pop-stars and dreary, redundant rappers, the music world has placed more of an emphasis on short, three minute tracks that contain no deeper purpose than to feed the all too eager masses just waiting to have their fill of ego driven artists, if that word is even able to be applied to these musical parasites.
Needless to say, this brain-washed crowd would not understand the sheer compositional genius displayed on this fantastic album, one that I consider to be an absolute staple of the entire funeral doom genre. They won’t be able to see past the hefty track length, won’t be able to delve for even a minute into the crushing, brutal mass that is Mournful Congregation’s masterwork, their pièce de résistance. But this composition wasn’t created for them.
Rather, it was made for the select few who look beyond recycled melodies, recycled drum beats, simplistic bass lines, and the dreaded auto-tune. People who can see beyond the Billboard charts to embrace the brutal waves of sound, interspersed with genius bouts of beautiful acoustic work, haunting and melancholic. This music is not mere music, but a brilliant atmospheric experience, a unique trip through the apocalypse and back, that will leave you both emotionally drained and invigorated. When The Monad of Creation is listened to through a quality set of headphones, in a dark room, and distractions eliminated, it truly is its own force of nature.
Funeral doom, whose main purpose in the musical world is to create the sonic equivalent of sorrow, of hopelessness, of death and dying, of the end of the world, has succeeded in filling that role quite nicely, and this experience that is so much more than a mere hour-long album, has set a new bar for which all others may aspire, a bar reached by only a few others; Evoken with Antithesis of Light, and Skepticism. But this work is more than even those; no other musical creation has ever succeeded in making me lose complete site of reality, so fully transported me to a world were all existence is shriveled and back. None other has made me want to return to this bleak depression nearly every day, after my return from its last harrowing journey.
Please, cease to call this music. When taken as such, what Mournful Congregation has achieved cannot be fully realized; rather, think of it as an entirely new existence, one that has never before been revealed. The Monad of Creation is a place of terrifyingly stunning despair. The world seems to slow to a stop under its crushing, claustrophobic weight, with only the occasional acoustic break in the storm that leaves the mind reeling to comprehend the phenomenon that has just occurred.
This is doom metal, in its purest form.
