Mountain Movers
Walking After Dark (2lp)
The current lineup of New Haven's long running Mountain Movers have been playing together for over a decade now, and to those that are tuned in, the feeling of communion is evident in the Movers' playing. The members swap and cycle effortlessly through instruments without missing a beat, utilizing the downtime of lockdown to write and record every jam in their practice space. Those piles of tapes would eventually get edited and sequenced into 'Walking After Dark,' a tour-de-force double-album that balances fried, stony brilliance with outré excursions of experimental serenity. Consider the opening track 'Bodega On My Mind' that ambles in like a road-worn traveller, its lysergic folk strums peppered with acidic lead lines from Battalene's Telecaster, eventually giving way to 'The Sun Shines On The Moon,' where the group's sizzling guitars are buoyed by Omonte's pillowy bass and Menze's percussion. From there on out, tracks like 'Factory Dream' give the listener a taste of The Movers' modus operandi here; a mixture of (more) traditional song craft interspersed between long-form, improvised pieces of modern psychedelia. The group shuffles through instruments; synths, drum machines, auto-harp, various forms of percussion (and whatever else was laying around) as well as the trad guitar/bass/drums configuration to craft a suite of songs that - while not necessarily similar in composition - feel unified in their overall sonic scope. Tracks like the 14-minute 'Reclamation Yard,' whose deep-space electronic pulse is juxtaposed against side C opener 'See The City's persistent acoustic strum that showcase similar ideas of the 'spirituality' of losing ones self in repetition, but executed differently. In many ways 'Walking After Dark's duality feels like a merger of 'On The Beach'-era Neil Young and the collective freak-outs of Amon Düül, taking inspiration in the 'incorporeality' of free music and lacing it with Greene's hazy, haunting lyricism and is an exciting step forward for a band that's already a few steps ahead.