Monolord: Your Time to Shine

The Swedish Trio Monolord have returned with an album that according to the guys sees the band looking inward to cultivate their heavy riffing into something with a darker edge. Your Time To Shine moves from doomy, straight to the point, almost caveman-like riffs on songs like the opener “The Weary'' to sweet acoustic passages and gentle melodic vocal passages on songs like “To Each Their Own� which does help to bring a nice element of diversity to the overall approach and sound.

Where I find it a bit frustrating at times is the slow glacial speed that things move through Your Time To Shine. For example the stomping caveman riff at the beginning of “The Weary'' feels too dragged out and the long drawn out doomy breakdown section in “To Each Their Own�, which does eventually build into something sounding pretty cool and epic, feels like it takes too long to get there. Like the weed they smoked before the session was putting everyone to sleep before realizing it was time to take the languid groove to a climax. The song goes for over seven minutes but could easily tell the same musical story in four. This is a recurring theme throughout Your Time To Shine.

I’m not the biggest fan of doom and stoner rock so take my opinions with a large grain of salt, but personally I can see many places throughout Your Time To Shine where the fat could be trimmed and you’d have a much more direct collection of songs. It’s not lost on me that the drone-like nature of the music is kinda the point but I feel like the riffs while cool at times aren’t original or striking enough to really justify the long drawn out nature of proceedings on Your Time To Shine. The band has moments throughout the album that do work very nicely and I’m constantly wishing they’d lean further in those directions each time I played the album. The vocals for example have an intimate immediacy every time they appear however they disappear for long periods and to the detriment of the songs.

Overall this is not a terrible album by any stretch of the imagination and in fact it’s that there are good ideas and execution here that make the experience more frustrating. The great vocals, occasional epic passages, like the cool groove in the title track around the 8:30 minute mark or the strong riffs, like in the beginning of “The Sirens Of Yersinia�, are just drowning in too much extraneous material and slow motion delivery to really allow me to really connect. All that being said I know there are people who love this kind of thing and if slow motion doomy stoner rock is your thing then definitely give these guys a listen.

Monolord:
Thomas Jager- Vocals, Guitar
Esben Willems-Drums
Mika Hakki -Bassist

Tracklisting:
1. The Weary
2. To Each Their Own
3. I’ll Be Damned
4. Your Time To Shine
5. The Siren Of Yersinia

Added: January 15th 2022
Reviewer: Benjamin Dudai
Score:
Related Link: Band @ Bandcamp
Hits: 510
Language: english

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