9. MONO - Lost Snow
It shouldn’t be surprising that several of the tracks featured on this list are the penultimate tracks of their respective albums; in a world of cohesive, thoughtful albums, the second to last track is often the climax. Over fifteen minutes in length, “Lost Snow” is suitably epic and is the example par excellence of the penultimate track. Without the context of the rest of the album, the grandeur of the track can easily be underestimated. Yet when considered in it’s proper place, the song [bad word] imbued with a much greater power. The entire track takes a central leitmotif as its point of departure, and Mono achieve greatness by controlling the timbre of their guitars and the crescendo of their (deafening) volume, placing a capstone on a marvelous album in the process. If Mono has [bad word] only one thing during its career, certainly it must be the mastering of the powerful climax, a la “Lost Snow.” (Joseph Sannicandro)