subject: Mountain Man - Made The Harbor [print this page] Mountain Man, the all-female trio of Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and Amelia Randall Meath, make bright, beautiful harmonies, their voices woven tight in haunting, traditionally rooted compositions that play with folk, gospel, and plainsong forms. There's very little accompaniment to these songs just a bit of guitar but that's all they need. Any more instruments and it would be harder to focus on their best quality: the vocals, well matched in high, inflected folk purity, meet and jostle and harmonize around melodies of disarming simplicity.
The ladies met at Bennington College, which two of them still attend. At least two of the three studied performance there, and you can hear a bit of formal training in the a capella lushness of Mouthwings or the medieval madrigal counterparts of the shadowy Babylon. Still, there's no academic dust on these lovely compositions. They seem as organic and freshly grown as shoots of grass in spring.
Early composition Dog Song has the green of new life in its delicate folk-blues slides, the eccentricity of outsider art in its skittery la-da-di-dah's. Animal Tracks distills Appalachian folk into dizzyingly clarity, the crisscrossing vocals raising the hair on the back of your arms with the sheer beauty of the notes. How'm I Doing is livelier, with the sweetened swagger of pre-war gospel quartet music, though more secular subject matter. I ain't bragging, but it's understood / Everything I do, I sure do good, they sing, with the tight old-time harmonies that evoke revival meetings, lonely train whistles, and crackly radio broadcasts.
Ghostly closer River coaxes a small chamber orchestra's worth of sounds out of the girls voices as they pipe staccato counterpoints to the main melodic line, making intricate harmonies sound easy, natural, and utterly lovely. Somewhat rough recording - a cough here and there, the sound of feet tapping rhythms only adds to the charm of Mountain Man's debut, which seems to have sprung fully blown out of a meadow somewhere, minor flaws and all.
by: VenusZine
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