ow does one go about making an album like Glam? This is an album that manages to be both exceptionally focused and cohesive while being first and foremost “experimental”. An album that teems with life, even if it’s really fucking minimal. An album that moves you powerfully and consistently, even if it contains nothing you can hold onto, nothing you can be sure about.


Glam plays like an entirely unsolvable mystery, one that lacks a tangible solution and exists as a challenge for everyone, and as a landmark for those who attempt to unravel it. And for those who do spend the time to figure out Glam, to marvel over its endless paradoxes and should-be-impossibilities, it will be a landmark, a monumental album for all of its innovation, power, and beauty.


The album glides by eerily most of the time, with odd sounds and climaxes interposed here and there to interrupt the flow (this arrangement is most likely due to its original purpose as a soundtrack -- oddly, as the soundtrack to a Tony Danza vehicle of the same name). Consequently, it loses the traditional feel of an album; Glam exists as some sort of colossal piece, always heading toward some finale, and never shifting focus or losing direction. This impression is amazingly real -- it's impossible to listen to this album without getting the sensation that it’s a journey, a route to something indefinite, but assuredly magnificent.


One might ask what that thing is, and if it ever gets there; the answer, most likely, is yes, it does, but that it does is entirely irrelevant. “Glim”, the album’s closer, is also its highlight, if it’s possible for such a term to apply here; but the idea that emerges with Glam is that the resolution doesn’t matter -- the search and the exploration is all that’s important.


There’s such a marvelous feeling of evolution on Glam, such a progressive form of invention, and so much direction in its innovation. This evolution begins with the first few minutes of “Port Dusk”, as simple, yet beautifully amplifying sounds conjure up an entirely perceptible image of dawn and birth. Soon, the music rises and a beat kicks in for the first time, and Glam comes to life, initiating its wondrous evolution.


And it’s beautiful, but it’s just the beginning of the unfolding, only the start of something un-stoppable. “Snap Bar” presents the next theme in the album, and by now, the listener has realized that Glam is different from other MoM albums; there is no “genre” here -- this is not the group’s “ambient” album, nor is it the group’s “jungle” or “dance” album (well, it certainly isn’t either of those), or anything but an incomprehensibly well approached experiment.


Have I mentioned how AMAZINGLY it all flows together? Here we have MoM covering musical ideas like “Tiplet Metal Plate” and “Hi Court Low Cut” for the first time, and despite the fact that the group is primarily concerned with invention, the result is an album with tracks that segue into each other with incomparable expertise. It’s just incredible to hear. MoM even uses foreshadowing to connect the separate pieces that comprise Glam (which may lend credence to the direction this review will soon take); “Glim”’s melody emerges twice before the song actually appears, on “Tiplet Metal Plate” and “Funky Tiste”.


When “Glim” finally comes, it’s an absolutely exuberant release; it’s fulfillment in its strongest form. Oddly, the song may be the simplest on the album, as well as the one most similar to MoM’s other works, but it still resonates with more power than any other track here, most likely because of what it follows. Acknowledging this track’s intensity as well as its simplicity, it becomes easier to understand why I say the voyage that Glam takes is more important than its conclusion, even if the voyage serves only to guide us toward that conclusion.


Now let me tell you where I’m really going with all this. Glam may be the most ambitious concept album I know; admittedly, I may have only thought of this because I recently wrote a short essay describing the meaning of life as the continuous search for beauty and meaning (and not a concluding epiphany), but Glam sounds to me like a comprehensive examination of life, one that describes its evolution, searches for meaning as all humans do, and produces beautiful results with the same frequency of a thoroughly rewarding life. And if it is such an album, then it’s the most blissful concept album I’ve ever heard, almost entirely succeeding at what it strives to achieve.


And even if it isn’t such an album, if MoM didn’t intend us to view Glam as a representation of all our lives in the grandest sense, if their musical experimentation didn’t symbolize our endless pursuits, the important thing is that the duo made us question what it does represent, that they put us into this reflective state. Glam is astounding because its elusive power makes us question everything, because the “how”s behind it are so difficult to comprehend.


Chances are, we’ll never answer any of the “how”s behind Glam; we’ll never know how St. Werner and Toma did it, how they made anything as brilliant and impossible to explain as Glam. Because it’s truly inexplicable -- I've never seen music exist as it does here. This is an album to examine forever, an album that should be questioned endlessly, even if you know you’ll never find the answers. Because therein lies its beauty, and few things are ever this inspiring. The pinnacle of an unimaginably creative band, Glam should be cherished as a masterpiece.