The Wily Filipino

And Now, One of the Best Albums I Heard In 2007...

…although this was released in 2006, is MONO & world's end girlfriend's gorgeous Palmless Prayer / Mass Murder Refrain, a five-part chamber music suite, as it were, for string quartet and post-rock band. A collaboration between Japanese composer Katsuhiko Maeda and the thunderous Tokyo trio that is MONO, the album is surely going to be one of my favorites of the year (and it's only January!).

Doubtless a lot of music fans more knowledgeable than I would point to music from a different tradition -- say, Shostakovich, Pärt, or Gorecki -- as more complex, more profoundly moving. But the difference is that MONO rocks: the moment in "Part Three" when MONO's Mogwai-influenced wall of guitar comes crashing down on the orchestra is a cathartic sonic event, only made more poignant by the calm resignation of the finale.

It's hard to describe the widescreen sorrow at the core of this music. It's something as mundane as the inherent loneliness of automobiles stranded on the freeway at sunset. But the ineffable grandeur it evokes is not just exit music for a film, it's Exit Music for real: ruined cities, a threnody for the broken earth, the dying sun's last defiant flare before the beginning of a cold, dead universe. Or as C.K. Williams puts it in his poem "Light," "…everything ends, / world, after-world, even their memory, steamed away / like the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain."