- Melbourne’s MNMM brings together three collaborators who’ve done time in a number of reasonably well established post-rock acts in that town. Guitarist Gerard Mason hails from Goodbye Enemy Airship, drummer Brian O’Dwyer is one half of Warpigs and vocalist Gelareh Pour sings for ZÖJ. In a couple of ways it’s Pour’s contribution which is the most distinctive here. Coming from Iran she sings vocals in Farsi and that's also her with the sound of the alto Kamancheh. An upright, stringed instrument, it's familiar across Iran and some other parts of the Middle East, though you might be fooled into thinking you were listening to the cello or viola (both pretty ubiquitous in post-rock), but listen a bit closer and you'll hear a subtle, tantalising timbre that just isn’t quite the same.
As an ensemble, MNMM are -at least at this stage- more at that jam-band end of post-rock. They gently ease their different sounds together, smoothing over the rough edges as they gently drift over the long, sometimes quite ambient cuts of their debut, Minimum. That’s not bad, although it lacks some of the electric precision that I’ve heard before, from some of the people here. It really pushes Gelareh into the position of a solo performer, a role which she adapts to successfully. Her lyrics are drawn -mostly- from Iranian poetry, which is a much more revered artform there than it is here.
Without knowing what Gelareh’s singing about, it’s hard for those lyrics to become much more than a diverting, exotic texture in the music, which is why it was very pleasing to discover the lyrics for single This Song Is A Lie transcribed in both English and Farsi on MNMM’s Bandcamp page. The poem by Houshang Ebtehaj, even in translation, is quite beautiful.
I want you, I heard it, I thought it was my lover / I thought that it was good news of a fresh and bright start, I thought it was my lost song, I thought it was the unknown witness of dreams / I want you, I heard it and followed the sound, I flew through the lustrous skies of fantasy / I returned with broken wings, when I realised the song was a lie.
I hope the band get to post the rest of the lyrics, it adds another dimension for an English speaking audience. This Song Is A Lie is also just about the tightest, musically, bring some much needed forward momentum and structure. There are definitely some other moments which really land, like the closer, Come Home, doing what post-rock does best and moving from the whisper soft to the catastrophically loud, but mostly through the power of Gelareh’s voice, which is astonishing. Moments like these feel like a proof-of-concept, the promise of what this band will become. That being the case, although there’s quite a lot to like about MNMM’s stylistic inflection on the post-rock genre, I feel like there might be much more to come.
- Chris Cobcroft.