Mountain Man 'Made The Harbor'

by everetttrue on Jul 22 2010, 01:00PM

Mountain Man
Made The Harbor
(Spunk)

Thoughts while listening to the debut album from Vermont folk trio Mountain Man.

I admire this music more than love it.

I appreciate the way you can hear everything: the thump of feet, the click of the tape recorder being switched on, the sound of birds singing in the background quite audible in the gaps between the acoustic and beautiful trilled harmonies. The hiss, the occasional handclap, the muted laughter. I appreciate the fact that little has been added to the three voices, just a dash of reverb and the occasional spot of acoustic. It's tempting to cite The Cowboy Junkies' The Trinity Session here - just a solitary microphone hung in an old church, everything recorded live - but Mountain Man's harmonies are more intricate, and there's far less instrumentation. It's also tempting to cite The Roches - three ladies, stunning harmonies - but Mountain Man appear to be all bright-eyed wonder and woodland splendour, not smart street-wise observation.

Sometimes listening to Made The Harbor feels like being in church, especially when the guitar cuts out: not in a negative sense, but for the solemn joy that can occur. Remember the scenes in Cold Mountain with the white Southern a cappella church choirs block singing, the cadences more important than the melodies? That approach resonates through the voices of Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Amelia Randall Meath, yet with something added. It's a solemn joy - you feel privileged to be listening. The entire album feels like a performance and, oddly, hence does not translate as well as it ought: you yearn to see these ladies sing together in an intimate live setting, and resent the barrier that recorded music presents. This feels like High Art and hence the admiration, not love. That could yet change. Perhaps if Mountain Man took a cue from their UK counterparts The Unthanks - different folk tradition, equally spellbinding voices and harmonies - and mixed in some bawdy humour...? No, it would dispel the magic.

I love the way the album seems to have a theme running through it - 'White Heron', 'Animal Tracks', 'Buffalo', 'Honeybee', 'River', 'Soft Skin' - the outdoors, nature, animals, Redwood trees, mountains, solitude, nature. It really helps increase enjoyment: it doesn't intrude (as lyrics often do): it increase the sense of magic around Mountain Man: it makes the listener feel like they're voyaging a gentle travelogue: it brings images easy to the mind: it allows one to lose oneself in the moment.

Unwary critics have compared Mountain Man to Bon Iver and Seattle's suburban hippies Fleet Foxes. That's like comparing snow settling gently on mountainsides as the sun sets purple and bruised blue to trampled-down slush on city sidewalks on a grey summer's day. Even the band themselves call their music 'indie' on their MySpace page. Whoa. Bad usage of the English language there.

I admire this music more than I love it. That's not meant to be a dismissal or denial, but high praise. And the feeling could yet change.

Everett True

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