Biography
Dim the Aurora is the new album by Austin, Texas’ Monahans, the follow up to their promising debut Low Pining. The journey to this point spans ten years, two bands, and five prior releases. You don’t need to know that to enjoy Dim the Aurora, but it certainly helps to appreciate its achievement.
Greg Vanderpool and bandmate Roberto Sánchez started making music in alt.country outfit Milton Mapes in 2001. Milton Mapes eventually grew to include current Monahans members Britton Beisenherz and Jim Fredley. After recording three full length albums and performing countless shows, the musicians had outgrown the very band they had created and realized the needed to kick their alt.country habit and explore outside their comfort zone. They wanted more from their music than Lone Star beer and cowboy boots. The band changed their songwriting process from the old singer-songwriter-with-a-band model to a more collaborative effort, allowing the different talents of all of its members to emerge. The change led to a dramatic evolution away from the dusty alt.country influence of their surroundings in Austin to the poppier anthems of early U2 and the earthier feel of Nebraska-era Springsteen. They realized that what they were doing was so different that it deserved a new beginning, and Monahans was born.
Monahans’ first album, Low Pining (Undertow, 2007) was a promising transitional album that straddled the line between what Milton Mapes was doing and what Monahans was about to do. The standout of the album is clearly the song “Undiscovered”. A sweeping, glossy pop anthem, the song epitomized the band’s new vision. “Undiscovered” is that magical type of pop song, all massive and airy and window-down-on-a-sunny-day; it’s instantly recognizable and it never gets old. That something so striking could come out of a band whose recorded catalog sounded so humble, galvanized Monahans. This single song marked a turning point for the band and provided a general blueprint for their second album, Dim The Aurora.
The album opens with the potently hopeful “It's Enough To Leave You...” and this, along with the rhythmically intense title track “Dim the Aurora,” really showcases the band’s newly discovered pop talents. But a blessing can also be a curse, and this has never been a band that is comfortable with the cage of genre. In order to give these anthemic pop vistas the space they need, the band has once again balanced the album with a number of instrumental tracks (including the twenty-plus-minute exploration “Terrene”) where human ambition and nature collide somewhere in a murky, mysterious spiritual realm. The achievement of Dim the Aurara is instantly audible. The band isn't a pop machine or a hit factory. Their scope has transformed them, for these eleven songs, into the lords of everything. This isn't one band making two choices in terms of its sound, it's one band making one choice 11 different ways in terms of its vision. With the album nearing completion and the promise of its rough mixes glowing from the speakers, Monahans were signed to Misra Records.
Although initially hesitant to leave Milton Mapes behind, the metamorphosis to Monahans has injected the musicians that created both bands with new lifeblood. In this era of 15-minute buzz bands, it’s inspiring to hear a career rock band take a quantum leap forward through reexamining who they are and what they want out of the music they play. It’s impossible (or at least a little pompous) to say, as of the writing of this bio, how the world will see Dim the Aurora within the pop music cannon but from where we are sitting, things are looking up.
Discography
