Mount Moriah is a real college town band-- though not in the pejorative sense. The band formed from a record counter friendship between singer Heather McEntire and guitarist Jenks Miller at the since-shuttered Schoolkids Records, on the University of North Carolina campus. On the band's rootsy, countrified second album (and Merge debut) Miracle Temple, McEntire sings of a life in a town ruled by student seasons, where you stay after everyone goes, leaving summer wide open. Album opener "Younger Days" ends on a question: "August is over so when are you coming back?" McEntire sings it with resigned hope: when they're gone, they're gone.
The album is nostalgic for people and times that can't be had again, no matter what magic you attempt. "You know I really tried, girl/ To lift your small town summer malaise," she sings, in ode to a wild girl who just couldn't hang. "How I tried for years to return there," goes "Union Street Bridge", recalling misspent youth. Most of the songs are in the past tense and measure the chasm between the innocent spoils of then and the sadness of now by what's been lost in the interim: fearlessness, blind love, the ability to make someone weak in the knees. "Go on, disappear," she sings on "I Built a Town", casting out this awful ghost of the perfect past. Miracle Temple orients itself from the knowledge that there is no being restored.
McEntire grew up on Southern Baptist hymns and Springsteen; the influence of both are evident here. The plaintive appeals in her lyrics and the soulful burr in her voice are church skills since refined for secular use. There is some Darkness on the Edge of Town within Miracle Temple; dreams too big for a small town, highways beckoning getaway from all that conspires to keep you there. In lieu of Jersey, high school sweethearts, and Carter-era gloom, it's the Outer Banks, straight girls' drunken flirting, and cruel summers.
But McEntire could be singing about anything with lyrics deep or dumb, and it would hardly matter-- there is that voice of hers. The comparison to young Dolly Parton is not undue; the quiver as she gets to the song's emotional center, the way she reigns herself in right before you expect her to belt it. Like Parton, she reserves her big voice for when she needs to bring out the drama. McEntire often gets pegged as post-punk, due to her proximity to the DIY scene she came up in, but on "White Sands", she stretches "kids" to nearly four syllables (something like "key-yuh-hid-s" with a little hiccup in the middle)-- conclusive proof that girl is country.
Alas, the rest of the band is not. They are very much Southern, but that is not that same thing. They lay in and drift a bit between punctuating, shuffling rhythms-- their loose hooks mimicking a drawl. Jenks Miller, a guitarist with enough confidence to occasionally venture solo as Horseback, keeps his accompaniment spare; his long single note runs to accent McEntire's melody lines fill in the excited silence.
The album's stand out track is "I Built a Town", which is the sort of Muscle Shoals throwback many attempt and few land. The strings swell, the organ whirrs, and you imagine a bouffanted McEntire, a la Dusty in Memphis, wiping her tears away as the back-up girls coo. She gave it all, and now, now there's nothing. It's easy to imagine that doing an entire record that straight would just be a showy genre exercise for them, but that can't keep a girl from wishing for more. The rest of the band obviously knows that McEntire is the showpiece-- songs like "Those Girls" show that they do, setting up her big moments with subtlety and understatement-- reminding us that the real power is in restraint.
