Though grunge will always be linked to Seattle, the genre’s image never squared with the suave skyscrapers and cosmopolitan mindset of one of the country’s most cash-flushed cities. Instead, it owed more to the flannelled, blue-collar sensibilities of the small factory towns outside of the city, like Kurt Cobain’s native Aberdeen, which helps account for why it resonated not only with tastemakers but also ordinary, meat-and-potato rock fans. T. Hardy Morris has long been fascinated by grunge's backwoods roots. "It was rural music," the singer/guitarist contended in a recent profile, likening it to the sounds he grew up with in Georgia. "It’s kind of like Southern rock."
For the last decade, Morris has explored the parallels between grunge and Southern rock with his band Dead Confederate, though both styles sometimes took a backseat to that group’s stoner-rock tendencies. Recently, Morris has also been dabbling in side projects a good deal less gloomy than his primary band, recording a couple of LPs with Deer Tick’s Robbie Crowell and Black Lips’ Ian Saint Pé as Diamond Rugs, in addition to a pair of solo albums that play like mirror images of each other. Where Morris’s inaugural solo effort, 2013’s Audition Tapes, was a relatively sedated singer-songwriter affair, seeped in the weeping pedal steels and confessional spirit of so many Nashville records, Drownin on a Mountaintop is its temperamental opposite—wild, prickly, and unsentimental. The twang remains, but this time grunge and punk are the driving impulses.
As Morris tells it, fatherhood inspired Mountaintop’s rowdier sound. He rushed to finish the record before the birth of his first daughter, and it beats with the urgency of a man trying to purge some final youthful bad decisions from his system before it’s wholly irresponsible to do so. On song after song, Morris casts himself as a fuck up at best and a menace at worst—a trope he borrows from outlaw country, though unlike a true rebel, Morris can’t stop his thoughts from cycling back to the toll of his actions and the example he’s setting. He presents the album’s booziest, blusteriest song "Likes of Me" as a cautionary tale for his imagined children. "Maybe I can scare you silly not to do the things I’ve done," he seethes maniacally, matching the song’s In Utero-sized stop/start riff with Cobain’s curdled yowl. On Dead Confederate’s first records, Morris was sometimes overeager to play up the echoes of Cobain in his voice, but over time his has developed its own character. Where Cobain’s croak was deliberate and authoritative, Morris’s is rangy and conniving. Even when he’s being earnest, he sounds like a grifter making a hard sell.
Unimpeded by the austere, psychedelic stretches that weigh down Dead Confederate’s albums, Mountaintop gives Morris’s voice ample space to roam, and it’s a thrill to hear him cut loose. That unbridled spirit comes at a cost, though, since Mountaintop’s loosest songs are so lackadaisically written they fall apart. With Audition Tapes, Morris penned considered tributes to the childhood friends he’d left behind, but there’s little of that depth here. Too many lyrics read like they were scribbled during between-take cigarette breaks. On "Starting Gun", he sets up the album’s shittiest pun: "See that clock up on the wall? I wound it up, and it ticked me off." A couple tracks later on "Littleworth" he grabs at the nearest adage, musing "It may sound lazy but the truth hurts," and, as cautioned, it does sound lazy. The thrashing title track offers an even blunter commentary on how thinly written it is. "What the hell is going on," Morris marvels after the chorus, "How can you call this a song?"
There are two types of clumsy lyrics: Ones that pass with limited damage, and ones so invasive they bring entire songs to a halt. It’s those latter ones that Morris steers into again and again, which is unfortunate, since otherwise his crash fusion of grunge and country has never sounded better than it does on Mountaintop. He’s got the attitude down pat, but he doesn’t always have the songs to back it up.
