Monarch of Monsters is the November 2024 album from Seattle-based musician, multi-instrumentalist, MLP creative staple, and singer/songwriter Vylet Pony.
Vylet Pony has been a staple of my life for years, ever since I finally worked past my initial phobia of MLP aesthetics (which could very well have been some remaining vestige of queerphobia rearing its head) and gave 2022's can opener's notebook: fish whisperer a spin. It was the kind of music I was looking for: equivalent to Porter Robinson's Nurture in my brain today, in sound palette, writing, and messaging, powerful enough to spur on the writing of a fever dream track-by-track overview. In every review I've written for a Vylet project (both on and off the site), I've eventually lost my cool and devolved into ad hominem swearing and praise. It boggles my mind as to how there is someone whose musical style appeals to me so deeply and has the talent and skill to pull it off almost flawlessly. From fish whisperer to her breakout CUTIEMARKS to the stellarly layered Carousel and the nostalgic throwbacks of GWAW—hell, even the one-off mixtape Paradise Valley, which has lost its staying power over the years save for songs like ECR and Brother—I have never felt so lucky to be able to enjoy a musician in all my life.
Pest opens the album with a somber piano. It trudges through the muddy fields of shoegaze like a dying man, melancholic and aware there is no way back home. This is where we find her, in the palace gardens. I want to build the scene for you here—it is 1679, in an equestrian world of sorts. The local bard, Vylet Cypress, has mysteriously disappeared, and in the wake of this event, a string of grisly murders follows. The townspeople quickly identify the culprit as Cypress, who begin to refer to her as Wolf—some in fear and some in divine reverence. In Pest's single art, Wolf is depicted at the scene of her latest kill, having just butchered her old friend Starlight Glimmer and messily devoured her body. The force of her blows is laced with primal fury, her shrieks echoing throughout the plains, heard by all. This is the scene depicted first in the description on the YouTube upload for the song—but it is markedly more violent than the song itself. Pest is laden with a gripping self-hatred, the ideal that drives Wolf in these horrible acts. She believes herself unable to be more than her mistakes and flaws, a monster. And so she plays into the stereotype she made of herself—death strewn in her wake. This is the beginning of the dual storyline played throughout Monarch—the story arc that Wolf/Cypress goes through is a mirror to Vylet/Zelda's own guilt at her complicity in the perpetuation of cycles of toxicity, queerphobia, transphobia, and hatred. This is an album that was borne of coming to terms with yourself—what you were and what it can make you into in the present day.
Pest ends with a short narration from Aria, the lamb goddess of The Locus—in Vylet Pony lore, a sort of purgatory between universes. She tells us that she was still the same Wolf then and Wolf now—but where is now? They are not estranged; this is all we can know, and so Wolf—
PLAY DEAD! PLAY DEAD! picks up with Wolf stumbling back to her cabin in the woods. Over the course of a thrashing, artsy punk rock instrumental, Wolf finds her body is changing. Every kill she racks up, her body absorbs the magic that once inhabited her victims—it's putting her on the path to ascension. Godhood. But of what? She doesn't know. Her snout is transmorphing into a muzzle. Her wings are stained with blood. The rivers run red, the trees have eyes. They're all staring at you. Your crimes are forever known. A lamb watches from between the trunks, incorporeal and silent. There is a plan at play here, a destiny. Wolf doesn't know it, but follow she will—the song's final chorus finds her concluding that the only way forward is to keep going. Kill after kill after kill after kill, take it like the bitch she is, and PLAY DEAD! PLAY DEAD! PLAY DEAD! PLAY DEAD! PLAY—
It is almost sobering to hear the happy-go-lucky GWAW producer tag reverberate against the dreary black lulls in between the stomping choruses of The Heretic (Woe is Me). The vocal run here in the chorus is insane—I can't even begin to describe it, but it reminds me of how Dick Valentine screams the title of Danger! High Voltage. Survivor's Guilt evokes a similar feeling, in cadence rather than vocal style. Here, we explore Wolf's mind in detail—the motivations I already established above now being laid out again and again. The last chorus is a kind of dark subtextual foreshadowing for the ██████ █████ that is fated to happen. Vylet screams the last lines in a doomy, sludgy, powerful stomping outro before Vitality Glitch switches gears into a minimalistic, gloomy electronic rock instrumental. For the Wolf, no happiness should be allotted—there is nothing of worth to the monster anymore. Isn't it great to be a beast? This is all you are worth now. The carousel spins round and round again; the wheels of fate spin on.
The 12-minute odyssey of The Wallflower Equation had me at points screaming so loudly that my father ran up the stairs to check up on me. It also had me completely speechless and slack-jawed for the first minute. Vylet panic attacks through a short poem up to the end of the first build, but the most biting lines of the album so far are right after:
We evolved to love, and you held me like a cancer. "The necessary evil." So I became you, and you laughed. It's a joke to you.
The guilt has plagued every minute of this godforsaken killing spree, as much as it plagued Lulamoon for years. Cycles upon cycles upon cycles upon cycles. A saxophone drones eerily, sputtering to life and back again. The drums build and build, and the wolf howls into the night sky. It feels like listening to BC,NR again, c. For the first time. It's the progressive black midi build as Vylet screams herself ragged: FUCKED MY LIFE! I'LL RUIN YOU! I'LL RUIN YOU FOR THIS! Lines that aren't explained in the album but become clear in the novella—she returns to town and is escorted into a hostel by a group of stallions who restrain and rape her the whole night through. And so the Wolf sees herself finally. She's terrified—she's always been. Where is she going? What is she doing? There is another way out. The Wolf knows what she must do.
In Princess Cuckoo, the ascendant monarch makes her choice. It is a masterpiece, a desperate voicing that screams for penance, but merely a 4-minute prologue piece to the single longest piece that Vylet has strung together yet—the 22-minute Sludge, the 13-part opus of the album, styled in the prog rock that bands like King Crimson cut their teeth in. Wolf submits herself for judgment, a kangaroo trial in front of a crowd—the Daybreak of Red Rivers. Reciting every transgression, every horrible sin, detailed to the end. Rivers run red as she cuts herself open for two whole agonizing minutes—every slice and stab of the blade punctuated with a horrible organ tone. She dies, right there. Her followers devour and defile her body, raping her in the throes of death. It is sickening to hear—Vylet's voice ragged, shaking with pain and agony, the last words of the Wolf, breath leaving her form:
"Strip my body, gouge my chest, they rape me until there's nothing left, love and tolerate this mess, defile and crush my every breath."
I am reminded of Diamanda Galás when she screams, at the end of this tortured breath, SINNER BE DAMMED! She howls as the end finally draws close. The Locus beckons. She awaits. Aria beckons the hunting dog. The Wolf is hers. Vylet interpolates HOW TO KILL A MONSTER from CUTIEMARKS before the fatal flaw rears its head, as it were. The lamb gives her a new body. Her old one remains at the Daybreak of Red Rivers, the countryside piled high with bodies. For the first time in either of her lives, she is held gently. It still feels harrowing—calmer and more serene than before, but still echoing with a biting undertone of unease, a grim and slightly eerie droning tone to see off the long dark.
But all is not well. In a prior life, before the Wolf and before Cypress, the spirit that was had inhabited a beast that had killed Aria's sister. This is the second penance—to be saved but bidden to Aria's will for eternity, to hunt down the lost and wicked souls wandering the Locus. It is Revenge Fantasy, plain and simple—a harsh rock piece a la Flair for the Dramatic from Carousel, mixed with a little bit of power rock melodies for the soul. It even echoes the outro of that song almost note for note, suggesting that this is the resolution that Carousel didn't get—because as it turns out, the main character of that album, Creekflow, had a similar, if less immediately violent, journey to Cypress's. It left its world frayed and broken, destroyed. It is the end of two journeys and onto the next.
Revenge fantasies are never that simple. You spend your life thinking about someone for eternity, desiring for them to be punished for their crimes, and of course the Wolf and the Lamb fell in love. Huntress is light and airy—the punishing hatred seemingly lifted from her shoulders. For a song that's about fucking, it is surprisingly bright and sunny, and indeed, this is the penultimate song the whole album revolves around. It is a song that's very clearly about furry sex, and instead of the neon-saturated, late-00s/early-10s gay club oriented sound that a good chunk of provocative furry music revolves around, Huntress is tender and intimate. It's an entirely different idea of sex--contrasting the usual cliches of sex as recreation or pleasure or eternal love or whatever, it's sexual intimacy with a focus on healing and reclamation. It's the beast discovering that, monstrous monarch she is, she can still be loved for the thing she turned out to be. The monstrosity only goes as far as you take it. Birds chirp around their lovemaking, the resulting explosive cinematic pop sequence reminding me of A Letter to the Princess from Queen of Misfits—funnily enough, that album spent its time in the hooves of Trixie, exploring her relationship with Starlight Glimmer. It is fitting in a meta way that this album opens with the latter being eviscerated—for both the album and how it was made. Vylet writes in the Bandcamp description that Monarch of Monsters was intended to be an antithesis to Queen of Misfits from the other direction. There are still echoes of that in here—the "woe is they" direction that Vylet intended is still present 4 years later. But this album began to take shape when Lulamoon began to claw away at her memories.
She writes that she
"had long been suffering from severe trauma memory suppression, and I spent several weeks clawing through everything I could to uncover the things my brain was preventing me from remembering."
It was a mental breakdown that was punctuated by long periods of insomnia, four-day streaks without sleep, and hallucinatory dreams in between. And in one of these dreams, she found herself in an empty room with empty friends. There was someone there named Aria, and she was led into a room with them. Aria was someone she knew from a long time ago—a vague recollection of an old acquaintance. In the dream world, Lulamoon had hurt them. And so Aria beckoned the wolf to list her every transgression, and thus the wolf did. And when she was finished,
"they finished crying and smiled. In the dream, they said they forgave me, and that everything was okay. I laid down, and they stroked my fur, and I only realized then that I had fur all over my body. They said, "rest now, little wolf," and then I began to fall asleep inside the dream…"
The album ends with the howl of a wolf—this was my only gripe initially with the album, that it ended so abruptly, and then I visited Vylet's Twitter to find that this was intentional! Amazing.
It is here I realized that I passed 2000 words, and I broke into laughter. She'd done it. The scholar found herself poised on the precipice of something, realizing she'd embarked on a lengthy journey and found a lifetime within. How do I even begin to wrap this monster up?
The themes of Monarch were always twofold—the journey of the Wolf from monstrous killer to defiled god to hunting dog is a mirror to Zelda Trixie Lulamoon's own journey from someone perpetuating cycles of bigotry to self-proclaimed monster to a guide away from the monster she once saw herself as. It's easy to see this as permanent atonement—as I can personally attest to in my own experience of this journey—but I have since strayed from this view. Can guilt and love sprout from the same seed? A thorny red rose and a lamb-white daisy? Not to me. The cycle has broken. The hunting dog reborn, guiding the lost to rebirth, away from the path of the wolf. A new purpose. You don't have to be that anymore. I was once that—a festering monster, complicit in spreading chilling hatred and general assholishness, following a crowd and never thinking of growing up. I didn't know a thing about myself—my transness, my inhumanity, my queerness, what I really was. The only good thing about the COVID lockdowns was that it gave me a chance to reorient. To figure myself out, to realize the things I'd done, and reclaim myself. Paradoxically, without the isolation of pandemic lockdowns and restrictions, it's reasonable to predict I would not be here today sharing this with you. It took me a long time to come to terms with what I was and what I had done, partially a result of my story being blurred and misshapen by both me and other people. It's still taking me on that long, winding path to accepting the flaws that I have. It's led me even to the present day to apologize endlessly for things that I am assured are not my fault. I still supplicate myself in desperation for judgment and am met with nothing but forgiveness. I think, in a sense, people like me and Vylet are shadows of the monsters we once were. The crown wears heavy, but wear it we must.
Vylet writes that Monarch ultimately is
"an allegory for how trauma, loneliness, and selfishness can turn you into a horrible person; it's about endeavouring to stay alive even within a terminal state of regret; how—in this regret—experiencing any happiness at all feels insincere and undeserved."
When the teaser for this album dropped, I made predictions on Discord that this would be an angry and sinister album. That this album would destroy me, that this album was about hatred. And perhaps, in a sense, I was right—technically, one of the album's biggest themes revolves around hate. But, emotionally, I was wrong—this, ultimately, is an album about learning to love yourself again. Through blood and turmoil and desecration, the broken are reborn. The last paragraph of Vylet's writeup details her own spiritual beliefs—atheist in all manners, a strictly rational mind. And yet,
"that being said, there is something that comforts me and encourages me to move forward with thinking of Aria as a real god, watching over me and being by my side. Perhaps they're watching o'er you too, dear reader."
I find myself in a more spiritual mind—esoteric and agnostic, a rejector and critic of organized religions—so it's a sentiment I can't help but echo. This is a deeply spiritual album—and while I would definitely agree it's not for everyone, I couldn't care less. I'll hold it close. I've been a creature with fangs and claws all my life. Maybe I'm still atoning, but whatever the case is, I have a duty. The lantern will stay bright under my watchful eyes. This is what we must attend to.
Oh, oh fuck, I didn't even cover the fucking novella. I'm nearing 3000 words now. Uhm, quick warning here—whatever I discussed in the album, the novella is a little more explicit in describing. The warning I gave above is reinforced tenfold here. In fact, maybe don't read it if you're not comfortable with the multiple depictions of tortured self-pleasure, graphic (if flowery) descriptions of rape, and illustrations of naked furries. Or, like, under the age of 18.
The novella is… something else. Reading it is an exercise in patience. The differences in Vylet's fictional writing and her lyrical talent are laid so bare it would be fitting to call it naked. Aria takes on the role of self-admitted absentminded narrator with assistance from her closest friend, Cadence—a sentient wolf hat, formed from the experiments she undertook to try and create a physical form for her sister Cadenza. It is difficult to really breach for the first 1/4th of the book—Aria's writing voice is woven so densely with heavy and flowery sentences, and the first chapter is nothing but technical explanations of the interconnected worlds and workings of the multiverse that a good chunk of Vylet Pony albums occupy. It feels, to me, as someone who is wholly unfamiliar with the lore and prefers to engage primarily with the music, a rushed overview of the whole shebang that wasn't all that engaging to begin with.
This is also partially compounded by Cadence's voice—the most hilariously stark contrast. I'll give an example from page 20, where Aria describes the world that Vylet Cypress inhabits, detailing the spiritual perceptions of a princess named Celestia (can you guess what world the wolf inhabits?). Many think of her as a god, and many others think of her as a heathen. It causes a civil war in which the Celestian church, as it were, wins out. It ends with this rather flowery line:
"They dreamt that one day, a brave dissenter would come about and lead a more profound resistance against the crown. Such fervent superstition meant that the ordinary Equestrian commoner lived in a constant expectation of this myth's fulfillment."
Cadence butts in here with her own opinion of Celestia, which ends with this sentence that I did not edit in the slightest:
"The way she talks kinda reminds me of Aria like "OUhg DOTH THOU WHATETH YOU REQUIRES OF ME" EHEHEHEHE... Talk about a bitch that loves bananas, she IS bananas."
The contrast is a pretty strange tug-of-war, where it almost feels like I'm reading fanfiction, and I couldn't decide whether I enjoyed that or not. On the one hand, I think Cadence is hilarious. On the other hand, it does not easily belay the serious topics the album and novella cover. At the very least, it picks up around page 29—no longer a dry and technical universe explanation, it becomes at times a grim and depressing narrative that has many more direct story connections with the cycles of hate that Lulamoon describes, with genuinely witty and fun banter between Aria and Cadence interspersed in between. And there are genuinely hilarious moments, like the guard captain Shining stumbling upon Wolf, somehow still hiding inside her home, and being thoroughly fear-bonered by the beast inside. Or, of course, if you felt like it hadn't picked up yet at all, you will definitely lose that feeling reading the gruesome and harrowing back-to-back depictions of Wolf being raped—first, in a hostel by a group of stallions, and then the Daybreak of Red Rivers. I'm not going to lie and say the novella was perfect, but I did enjoy reading it.
Back to radio silence for another year. I work two jobs now, and I work nights mostly. Shit is FUBAR, as they say.