Long ago, monasteries were places of: work, prayer, meditation, bread-baking and eating, wine-and-beer making, lectio divina (a form of extreme reading, self-interviewing, and internal monologuing), endless grave-digging, and practical jokes. Novitiates were, of course, figures of fun for the more established brothers, often made to wash all the monks’ dirty robes by hand, handcraft the entire abbey’s supply of sauerkraut for the winter, or, on feast days, prepare the banquets for the rest of the abbey while being permitted to consume only a lightly warmed stew of water and old potato peels for themselves.Kunzite’s “Monks” is creaky, lurching, segmented fun. A utilitarian jam. Mike Stroud, of Ratatat, is half of Kunzite, and you can hear that Ratatat sound—those guitars (which seem to shift between phases of being tightly wound, or whiny, or growling, or glowing, it’s an unmistakable sound regardless).[BUY Birds Don't Fly]