Thrill Jockey claims that most of Choral, the third album from Brooklyn drone-duo Mountains, was recorded without overdubs, the group's guitars and organs and various other noisemakers looped and fractured mostly in real time. It's a semi-unique practice for quasi-experimental, long-form composition but ultimately one of those "it sounds like a turntable but it's really a guitar"-constructs that matters very little when a record is coming out of your speakers.
This is especially true when the duo's bushel-full of "organic" instruments ("Metal bowl?" "Books?") are garbled to the point where they are unrecognizable anyway. But Choral is still the most coherent Mountains offering yet, its six tracks moving in definable, familiar arcs. The eponymous opening track feels transformative, an a.m. burst of percolating electronic undercurrents, reverberating piano chords, and wordless sighs. Each of its nearly 13 minutes is perfectly balanced, a base to whatever acids exist in your headspace.
Mountains are Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp; they founded the Apestaartje label in 1999 and have produced two albums of nimbly grand, organ-driven drone since 2005. Since their eponymous debut they've been unwinding their unwieldy compositions, leaving tracks whose instrumentation and mood hew closer to folk music than the electronic tone-poems of some of their peers.
The duo works mostly with recognizable sounds-- an organ key held until the gain huffs and pants, shimmering 12-strings, ruminative accordion swells-- and even when they employ electronic noises their compositions seem pleasantly threadbare. The Fahey-lite acoustic pickings on "Map Table" solidifies the idea that "avant-folk" is probably as appropriate a title for Mountains' work as drone or ambient. Choral's palpitations and slow climbs make a comparison to someone like Jack Rose seem like a stretch, but Mountains can find camp near the warmed explorations of Charalambides or Six Organs of Admittance.
On "Melodica" the plateau'd organs act like a bug zapper for skittering detritus before the track yields to pillowy, fingerpicking. "Telescope" laces together humble electric guitars, resembling the slight dissonances of Flying Saucer Attack or Windy & Carl. The bubbling loops of "Add Infinity" buoy the song's lake-clear acoustic thrum.
Mountains remain fairly straight-laced for an experimental project, and Choral contains many moments of blissful saturation. But the duo's build-build-fuzz-comedown formula leads to shiny moments that are pleasing but not exactly hard-earned. "Add Infinity" abandons its ear-pricking acoustic progression and descends into a typical white-noise fog; "Telescope" suspends movement for a long, trebly note before it fades; even "Melodica" rises to a cinematic swell. Aurally pleasing moments, all, but their inevitability precludes the total blissouts those tracks suggest.
As a result, Choral sometimes feels staid and a little postcard-y: a pretty gesture that fails to eclipse the experience of actually going somewhere. That's OK: The best parts of Choral-- the title track, "Melodica", most of "Add Infinity"-- suggest that the band's moniker refers less to the vistas their music may or may not evoke and instead to the shifting strata of sound they create. On Choral, Mountains arrange those layers in ways just subtle and precise enough to shift your headspace.
