Georgia, 1/4/08 - Not for the faint of heart, San Diego-based, Ilya E. Monosov’s debut album is full of love songs. Listening to it is like putting your heart in a frying pan. Monosov is best known for his work with the mystical, folkadelic Mountain Home. Both share the same mysterious label Language of Stone. Not always successful, the unwieldy, absurdly-titled Seven lucky plays, or how to fix songs for a broken heart drags the heart’s emotional depths.

Monosov definitely has some blue fire in his heart to create this romantic album, submerged in lounge-folk meeting deep-space psychedelic soul meltdown.

Monosov paces a gray line between tongue-in-cheek expression and authentic hurt. Part of the problem resides in his strange vocal delivery, reminiscent of Serge Gainsbourg’s sleazy, contrived, sexy monologues and Alastair Galbraths’s soothing monotone. Conceptually, the album also points to Lee Hazlewood’s Requim For An Almost Lady. Both put heavy weight on romantic poetry dealing with romantic frustration and tragedy. Hazlewood did his with much more warmth and humor, while also convincingly conveying heartbreak. Mosonov, though not pretentious (he’s too damn eccentric), comes across deadly serious.

“Happy Song” finds him seductively whispering “I’ve never written a happy song/And darling that is true/I’ve been singing these old blues/And never wrote a happy song.” Such unabashed romanticism is like a python in the Arctic Ocean of today’s fragmented musical scene. Not necessarily a criticism, he has taken a romance novel and transported it into the realm of psychedelic rock. Instead of drinking himself silly after the end of a love affair, Monosov took liquid LSD. To be fair, his lyrics are better then standard romance trash. Sometimes he channels Elizabeth Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.

The album lies somewhere between eerie, with the ghostly grasping “The Burning Flame,” and sleazy, with the chicanery of “Winter Lullaby.” Though probably seductive to the right (or wrong) woman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Leonard Cohen and Dante had to have done penance by writing terrifically terrible romantic poetry for a king whose queen refuses to not sleep with him for very good reasons.

“The Burning Flame,” on the other hand, has driving minor acoustic guitar paired with wrenching harp. Sweeping strings, like a shivering cold wind, meet the brutal, honest lyrics, “I tried to taste your beauty/and indulge in all its ugly forms.”

Monosov’s debut will interest anyone into experimental music, or the art of album-making for its textures. Though his romantic, meandering luridness can be off-putting, what would be interesting is to see him do a duet with a woman, ala Gainsbourg and Birken or Hazlewood and Sinatra.

The Beauty That U Are:

- By Matthew D. Proctor for The Stonewailer

Matthew Proctor resides (technically) in Stone Mountain, Georgia warding off despondent confederate soldiers. He spends his days and nights in a frenzy balancing the impossible task of making ends meet while pursuing creative pursuits such as urban archeology, obscure poetic explorations and two bands, which seem to make people uneasy. He also likes to crawl in muddy ditches away from capitalism’s fierce banter in whiskey and wine hazes. He has a black whiny cat named Montag who has severe mental health issues.