MUSIC REVIEW: MOUNTAIN MAN - 'MADE THE HARBOR'

Folk Tunes of Feminine Strengths and Softness that Float Above the Usual

By: Andrew Shaw

July 29, 2010

(Partisan Records) There’s irony in the name of Mountain Man, an all-female trio from Vermont, but the irony, thankfully, ends there.  Made The Harbor is an austere, precious debut where showy cleverness is dropped and open, uncomplicated sincerity is the tone.

Nature, the true romantic force at play on the planet and all of its creatures, courses beneath almost every track, with dogs, insects, buffaloes, hills, and rivers all used as external points of reference for the internal landscape.

Aside from the complex three-way harmonies that profile the unfettered talents of Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and Amelia Randall Meath, the mood is intimate, simple, naked.

In an age of traffic, plastics, and microwave meals, it’s good to be in touch with something organic, untreated, and pure. What Bjork tried to accomplish with Medulla — using only vocal performances — so Mountain Man achieves here with just the slightest support from instruments. When instruments are used, they usually arrive as a finely picked acoustic guitar, low in mix, or a dampened foot-tapping that sounds as if it’s coming from some distant room — the ghost of tempo.   They’re flashes of muted color on monochrome water-painted sheets.

From song one, “Buffalo,” we listen to a narrator bearing witness as “the Mississippi swells” which contain a slow certain power which reemerges in the closing track, “River.”  More than once, we feel like we’re going “down to the river” for some kind of religious experience.  “Babylon” is a track first reworked on Don McClean’s American Pie album — actually, Psalm 137 from the Christian Old Testament — so there is a definite spirituality at play here, though perhaps one more to do with nature than with Church or scripture. 

Nothing is fevered or forced; these women seem more interested in deliberately crafted expressions of awe.  “Soft Skin” paints an impression of fighting lust, struggling for sexual strength whilst retaining old-school femininity. “Don’t you understand, I’m trying to be a good woman?” as a lyric is both haunting and sexual, and again, true to the nature of things.

Made The Harbor lives in the tradition of American Folk, but it is most certainly a modern album; the world of categorization is a fickle thing.  All it takes is one of the album’s more atmospheric songs to be placed on the right vampire movie soundtrack and Mountain Man will be considered an Acoustic Pop band, describing the deep, natural urges of women everywhere.

For Fans Of: Hem, The Innocence Mission, Natalie Merchant

Standout Tracks: “Dog Song,” “Buffalo,” “River,” “Soft Skin”