The Monochrome Set
Lotus Bridge
TAPETE
The Monochrome Set are an ever-so-slightly obscure, terrifically gifted English band who have been together for 48 years (give or take a hiatus or two). Their crafty, catchy, irradiated, pretzel-shaped rock music very much should have been on your radar already, but their recently released 17th studio album Lotus Bridge is a magical soundtrack for this uncertain spring. It’s a lovely, unexpected, sad-happy delight—tiny music from the Anglophile giftshop.
The Monochrome Set were always a wonderful, strange boutique, to borrow the title of their 1980 debut, and fairly sui generis within the sneer, bar chords, and minimalist gloom of the early post-punk movement. A mofongo of Sparks, mid-period Kinks, English music hall, The Shadows, and post-feedback Velvet Underground, their fascinating and original sound blended melody, Sputnik guitars, arched eyebrows, and a delight in crossing genre boundaries. Those elements still resound on Lotus Bridge, though youthful spirit has been tempered by age and grace. The result is something poised, exotic, and engaging from start to finish, and washed with all the right kinds of bittersweet—at times pastoral and late-dusk violet, at others sun-dappled and city-shadowed, but always hopping, sighing, skipping, and lullabying.
Lotus Bridge is chiming and singular, wistful yet not maudlin. In its steady, strange sweetness, the record conjures this thought: What if Fables of the Reconstruction sashayed and stopped to play jacks instead of wrapping itself in kudzu and Gaudi dreams? Perhaps more significantly, what if Morrissey (whose affection for the band is well-documented) made the album you always hoped he might make, full of serpentine melodies, sidewinder bass, double-timed tennis-rackety guitar, and each song a jewel? It’s a very, very rare artist who, nearly half a century or more into their career, makes an album as good as anything they’ve done before. This is the rarified air also breathed by Dylan, the late Scott Walker, and Wire, to name just three artists, and Lotus Bridge is such an album. If it was the first Monochrome Set record you ever heard, you could still fall in love with the band.
There’s so much to say about this large, little miracle that I can only give lip-service to its themes and the significant emotional effect this album leaves on the rapt listener. Clearly an album about loss, hope, and the ability of the marvels of love and the universe to comfort us as we wrestle not only with aging, but with world’s end, Lotus Bridge celebrates life in the moment, and the moments of life. It’s a reminder that although we no longer have a passport to the past, sometimes we find a gorgeous postcard that has fallen behind the fridge. The Monochrome Set are a vastly important and rewarding band, and reveling in the chiaroscuro luxury of Lotus Bridge is a wonderful way to honor that.
