From Monument to Masses
The Impossible Leap in One Hundred Simple Steps

Reviewed by James Adams
03.06.05

If LiP Magazine had its own private army—battalions of young revolutionaries poised to storm the white house, the pentagon, and the local armory at any given moment—this is the album that would be playing incessantly throughout their barracks. The Impossible Leap in One Hundred Simple Steps, the sophomore effort by the San Francisco based trio From Monument to Masses, is forty seven and a half minutes of tricky changes, unorthodox time signatures (a tad derivative of Chicago's Volta Do Mar and Louisville's Shipping News) combined with numerous samples of quotes from Arundhati Roy, Noam Chompsky, and other intellectuals in the vanguard of leftist discourse. The album begins with a sonic montage of television sound bites, then erupts into a flurry of throaty vocals, choppy guitars, and high hat-heavy drumming that meld into a soundtrack for the horror and confusion Americans experienced as the symbols of US economic and military potency are brazenly assailed. The highpoints of the album center around the plethora of vocal samples used to highlight and critique the political idiosyncrasies of contemporary American culture and to call for widespread resistance against the tyranny of US foreign and domestic policy. This is an album that everyone who calls him or herself a progressive should steal from their local corporate chain music store.