The First Important Rock and Roll Album of the Year
With all due respect to The Boss, this is the first important rock and roll album of the year.
The Mountain is a trip through sadness, redemption, anger, and pedal steel guitar. ‘Singing as though life may depend on it’ is a phrase I generally reserve for Celine Dion, but the same intensity could be applied to singer-guitarist-all-around-badass, Erika Wennerstrom. Wennerstrom’s vocals are at times indecipherable, but in a good way. Like Dion’s, they arrive from a place of needing to come out, or life may not go on. Unlike Dion’s, she has the kind of vocal intensity that does not make you want to climb out of your skin and change the station.
When songs are personal in nature, and you love them, it seems natural to feel like they were written just for you. Lines of lyrics that may have been just a piece of the puzzle that the songwriter wished to create, take on life in your imagination. They can remind you of so much, sometimes in the specificity of the words, the “I-Can’t-Believe-Someone-Else-Put-To-Music-Exactly-How-I-Felt-When…” or the vibe itself takes you back. There are pieces of that sentiment all over this record, a lyric here, a guitar lick there. Once I finally stopped hitting repeat on the opening song, title track ‘The Mountain,’ and experienced the rest of the album a few times through without stopping, there were more than a couple of times when I had to pause and rewind to be sure I “got it.”
“Could Be So Happy” is an acoustic, echoed lil’ ditty where Wennerstrom opens by stating, “I could be so happy if I just quit being sad.” It’s well-arranged in its obvious nature, and being second in the tracklisting, it almost helps serve as a thesis statement for the rest of the manifesto. By contrast, “Early In The Morning” which follows “Could Be So Happy” hits you in the face without being eased into the tune. The band performs this phenomena continuously throughout the album; at one moment, they are rocking you in their arms with care and love, and in the next, your ass is hitting the cold concrete and you just, well, have to be in pain and be rocking out. Though there are multiple personalities present in the order of the music, I could not imagine it any other way.
The music itself is tangential rock and roll solos at times; but it’s less crunchy-granola-noodly-jam-band and more……Zeppelinesque. The presence of the pedal steel guitar is just right, and serves as a reminder that real country roots, not the crap this generation thinks is country-western music, have a place in rock music, provided the producer know what to do.
Wennerstrom and her new lineup have created a rock album that is intense, beautiful and filled with heart, though their name may suggest otherwise.
