Portico Quartet - Monument

It's rare that a band releases two albums within six months of each other, rarer too that while both are so different, they are both as epochal in terms of the band's output as Terrain and Monument are to Portico Quartet. The irony is that Monument, a stripped-back, intentionally direct album, was the album that the band set out to write in May 2020, before the dream like long-form Terrain came into focus. If Terrain addressed the darker, uneasy sense of the pandemic, then Monument longs for better times, pulsing with energy, radiance and a scalpel sharp focus.