saw them with High on Fire a few months ago. It was intense, but after a while I got impatient (it around 11ish, and I wanted High on Fire to come on so I would be on the Metro at a reasonable hour).

i had mono in hunior year high school. i was prescribed to adderal for a while so i never felt the fatigue that comes along with the illness. also at this time, i was running long distance for the high school track team. because of the adderal i was getting sicker and sicker without ever realzing it. one day i thought i had a hyrnia (spelling) due to a sharp pain in my left abdomen muscle. little did i know it was a full blown spleen infection due to one of the most severe cases of mono he had ever seen? thanks school psychologists! your simplistic labling of ADD to us kids with short attention spans and hyperactivity not only is bullshit, its making us SICK. anyways, mono wasnt so bad, yeah i felt like shit and all, but i slept all day, got tons of codeine for the spleen (ate about 8 a day then told mommy i needed more), my mom made me milkshakes, listened to thousands of records, watched tons of movies, and missed 5 weeks of school/track. come to think of it, mono was fucking AWESOME!

umm, o yeah, mono, the band, i love their record "walking cloud and deep red sky..."

saw them twice, once with high on fire, once with pelican.

good band

i love them! each record keeps getting better and better.

if you haven't checked out gone or all the eps involved, then go and do so.

Their collaboration with Worlds End Girlfriend is beautiful. All their music is beautiful, but the WEG collaboration is particularly beautiful.

new, first official video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bAUK-aoqt8&fmt=18

plus new album up for preorder.

----

by the way, how is world's end girlfriend like live?

I saw him support them in a tour, it was NICE, it's basically laptop action + superguitar when he plays solo (like when I saw him), but he also plays with an ensamble/band, I guess it depends on the material he wants to bring on tour and on the budget for the tour...loved it. there are a couple pics I took in an ancient thread o' mine, methinks.

Touring all over Europe (except for the countries that are trying to ban ethnic food) this spring:

20 Mar 2009 Brighton, UK
21 Mar 2009 Birmingham, UK
22 Mar 2009 Manchester, UK
23 Mar 2009 Glasgow, UK
24 Mar 2009 Sheffield, UK
25 Mar 2009 Bristol, UK
26 Mar 2009 London, UK
27 Mar 2009 Lille, France
28 Mar 2009 Haarlem, Netherlands
29 Mar 2009 Hamburg, Germany
30 Mar 2009 Copenhagen, Denmark
31 Mar 2009 Gothenburg, Sweden
01 Apr 2009 Oslo, Norway
02 Apr 2009 Stockholm, Sweden
04 Apr 2009 Berlin, Germany
05 Apr 2009 Poznan, Poland
06 Apr 2009 Dresden, Germany
07 Apr 2009 Prague, Czech Republic
08 Apr 2009 Vienna, Austria
09 Apr 2009 Munich, Germany
10 Apr 2009 Athens, Greece
12 Apr 2009 Brussels, Belgium
13 Apr 2009 Oberhausen, Germany
14 Apr 2009 Frankfurt, Germany
15 Apr 2009 St Gallen, Switzerland
16 Apr 2009 Montpellier, France
17 Apr 2009 Barcelona, Spain
18 Apr 2009 Madrid, Spain
19 Apr 2009 Toulouse, France
20 Apr 2009 Bordeaux, France
21 Apr 2009 Nantes, France
22 Apr 2009 Paris, France
23 Apr 2009 Esch-Alzette, Luxembourg
24 Apr 2009 Tilburg, Netherlands

thanks.
I noticed.
Lately quite a good number of bands are "snobbing" italy, but it's probably due to the effective difficulties to set up a decent tour over here. Oh well, I'll try and enjoy the italian bands I can see a few times a year, uff.

whats wrong with italy regarding organisatory things?

Basically the live gigs "industry" is not much remunerative all in all for bands with no big organization behind (no matter how good is the label they're on). I organized (along with some friends) a little gig for Mono back in the days, and even if the ticket was just something like 5 euros some people said "uh, 5 euros for a band that I don't even know is too much" and went on buying beers for 5 euros each on the upper floor's bar...here it goes like this: you are somehow famous (blogosphere talk, vids on tv, some vip says "these guys are cool", all the people who like that vip will automatically like that band etc etc), people come to the concerts. you are an amazing not well known band there are not many chances a "curious" audience will show up. When 65dos played here in italy, in their one and only tour over here till now, there were like 40 people in the audience in a nice club I used to go to. And I brought there like 12 of them who had no idea on who these guys were.

btw some good things happen over here too (like seeing mono in a big cinema hall with soft seats and perfect acoustic, or seeing shellac in a crazy small venue, or seeing eits play in an abandoned cinema, sonic youth in a big industrial site etc etc)

the one more step album and the sun shimmers bright in the sky but we procrastinate too long about the amount of words in this album title to really know if we are translating our native tounge into english correctly albums are pretty good but you are there and whatever they released since bored me to be honest.......

true story, a mate went for dinner with acid mothers a couiple of years back. these guys were very quiet and reserved and spoke virtually no english..... during the meal the subject of mono was mentioned amongst my mate and his, makoto piped up and said the only thing in english for the whole nihght "MONO??? BAAAAAD!"

my mate is a gig promoter in dublin so thats why he had an amt dinner.......

I love that album they did with World's End Girlfriend. Other than that, they're kind of okay.

they're kind of shit

sounds crazy, germany is a mixed bag
I think hamburg is just a really good audience everytime I expereinced them.
berlin is the most elitist. its like "aaaah booooring I already knew them 10 years back" the venues are totally empty till a few songs have been payed from the main act. thats where the average berlin people show up after they had done their more "interesting" things. but if a band is really good they get rewarded even by the belin crowds :)

they are the only active post-rock or whatever band that i actually give a shit about.

i guess their hype phase has passed and i think that's great.

you should give a chance to:

apse
shora
september malevolence
65daysofstatic

perhaps a few more, but these are good bands imo.

Damn, I'm listening to their last album (got it yesterday) and it's fuckin' beautiful. And usually I don't even like "overly epic sounding post rock". The sound is incredible.

It IS good isn't it!

Saw them in Brighton back in March - very impressed!