The ongoing psych/folk resurgence has birthed countless curiosities, unpolished gems, and treasures designed to sound just like their once-buried inspirations. Yet it's also required a tremendous suspension of disbelief that in this day and age so many are embracing the aesthetics of bygone eras with the same fervor as Renaissance fair revelers and exacting Civil War reenactors. The scene's so lacking in irony it's practically ironic.
The second release from Drag City affiliate Language of Stone-- the label run by Greg Weeks (of the Espers) and wife Jessica Weeks (of Woodwose)-- Mountain Home's self-titled debut collects such (maybe not so) strange bedfellows as Shining Path guitarist Ilya Monosov, buddy Joshua Blatchley, Kristin Sherer, Marissa Nadler, and Greg Weeks himself. Yet the five-song disc is so spare, so reserved, so removed from the usual cluttered collective approach that credits are almost superfluous. In fact, it's so easy to get caught up in the carefully fostered and savvily promoted self-seriousness of the psych/folk scene, which features so much naval-gazing its adherents are practically doing summersaults, that every once in a while it's best to ignore the proper names and credits and just go with the music.
Mountain Home's brand of glacial, haunted songs comes from such an eerily pure place that it's virtually otherworldly. It works like noise canceling headphones, shutting out the world and pulling your attention exclusively to the songs themselves. It's music meant not only to clear your mind, but expand it as well.
Or so we might assume. Maybe Mountain Home designed the disc for washing the dishes. But there's something unavoidably compelling about the opening "The Sparrow" that transcends coffeehouse musings and autumnal daydreams. There's a tension to the song drawn from the subtle addition and subtraction to and from the already scant instrumentation, with the closing subcutaneous drone of strings and harmonium a powerful punctuation mark to a track that might otherwise have trailed off as ellipses.
"Battle, We Were" is more of the same-- with an emphasis on more, though even at over ten minutes the song doesn't overstay its welcome. Does it need that much time to say what it needs to say? No. But like "The Sparrow" its effects are cumulative, so what's the rush?
The rest of the disc plays out in similar fashion, albeit with slight but significant variations. "Comes, the Winter" is bookended by abrasive dentist's drill drones, the startling intro drawing back until the hum of the harmonium is brought into better focus (though not as cleanly as the crystalline guitar). The traditional murder ballad "Omie Wise" includes fragmented banjo and spectral vocal swells, and when the song goes silent for a nearly imperceptivity short breath, the effect calls attention to the appropriately Gothic vocals once they resume: "Hold me, dear Omie, tell to you my mind/ My mind is to drown you and leave you behind."
It's some spooky shit, as is the next traditional track "Nottamun Town", which could be a surreal account of the last moments before death (and allegedly may be one inspiration for Dylan's "Masters of War"). "Ten thousand stood round me, and yet I's alone," sings Blatchley, as if from the perspective of a fallen soldier watching the battle go on around him before all goes dark. If you do manage to suspend disbelief, you might just buy that there's something deeper to this most formal of formalist exercises than an archivist's curiosity, ear for good material, and knack for imitation. Suspend disbelief, and you just might buy that Mountain Home is serious about keeping this music alive for another generation of imitators.
