Ever since people began to appreciate the world around them, storytellers have represented the natural world through the "mother" metaphor. Glory Hope Mountain, the title of the debut LP from Ottawa's the Acorn, is a loose translation of Gloria Esperanza Montoya, the given name of group-leader Rolf Klausener's mother. In a touching, symbolic representation of her life as told to her son, these songs are Klausener's own reinscription of his mother's life story onto the landscape that helped shape it. Mountain's lyrics are rife with anthropomorphic surroundings-- "mounatins like diaphragms," "scenery painted by brushes of hair," "a landscape that is breathing," "the heavy clouds that crowd your head"-- and maps made of stars and rivers, binding the journey it chronicles with the earth that facilitates it.
Mountain came together in a manner similar to the Fiery Furnaces' own oral-history project with their grandmother, Rehearsing My Choir: Klausener recorded a series of lengthy conversations with his mother-- about her childhood escape from a troubled, abusive environment in Honduras, and journey north to Canada, where she re-settled, married, and had a son-- and set them to music. Where Mountain parts formally from Choir, however, is in the details-- or more specifically, the lack thereof. The album is dedicated, through a small mention in the lower right corner of the liner notes, to Montoya, but the only time we hear her actual voice is on "Sister Margaret", as it bookends a wistful piano and lapsteel instrumental. Specific references are dotted throughout, but Mountain is no biography. Instead, Klausener crafts from her stories an allegorical narrative of strength, perserverence, love, and redemption.
The record has some ethnomusicological underpinnings: While writing it, Klausener researched Honduran indigenous music, which has connections to the West African roots of many of its practicioners, but stopped short of replicating it outright, preferring to learn from its rhythmic pecularities and translate them to his own folk-collective worldview. "Crooked Legs" is easily the best example of the band's strengths; a melodic hodgepodge of brass, rumbling drums, intricately plucked guitars, and Klausener's plangent vocal melody do more than their parts to propel a charming, inspirational lyric. Elsewhere, the group (five core members and a dozen or so hired hands) avoids generic world-music traps, using dynamic shifts and evocative instrumentation to forward the narrative: "Hold Your Breath", for instance, opens the record-as-journey by replicating the quiet of a nighttime escape before expanding into a jammy coda of sun-soaked freedom and the wonder of the natural world, seguing into the tribal percussion and chanting of the dramatic "Flood Pt. 1".
Maybe appropriately for an album devoted to finding one's way through unknown territories, there are times when Klausener's muse wanders. His drive to globalize musically pays off more often than not, but in terms of sentiment, he occasionally catches himself in thickets. Declarations like "my blood runs through your heart with every beat," which echo throughout, are touching if not a touch hokey and simple, while a line like "whitewashing avenues of our widening disparities" veers off too far in the other direction, trying for highminded poetry but landing in the purgatory of the too-wordy. A concentration on the intricacies of Klausener's own verbiage raises a final, fleeting, and speculative question, however: How much is lost when Montoya's story is shook down to a series of pretty, impressionistic renderings? It's nice to approach Mountain in the manner of any sentimental gift from a son to his mother, but in terms of its circulation outside the two of them might we be equally enlightened by, say, her actual words?
That first lyric, though, functions as Mountain's solemn conclusion, to the song "Lullabye (Mountain)", which affirms Klausener's own recognition of the inevitable course that life takes. Regardless of what happens between birth and death, all stories must eventually conclude, and those endings so often mirror the beginnings.
