Double LP
The band’s first true double album. Walking After Dark is released on black double-Ninth(!) album of outerzone psych rock dynamics from New Haven's true-to-their-name Mountain Movers. I can't recall writing about the band here before, which is unusual given their credentials - the great Kryssi Battalene of Headroom (more on her elsewhere this week) features on guitar and singer Dan Greene collaborated with World of Echo alumni Stefan Christensen on the vastly underplayed Why I Was A Burglar tape on C/Site from a few years ago. Stranger still, of all the associated acts in the current CT orbit, Mountain Movers feel like perhaps the best positioned for wider acclaim, allying their unrestrained sonic ambitions (this one's a double disc-er with three songs wandering well past the ten minute mark) with a clear appreciation of the Great American Songbook, by which I mean that of The Band and Crazy Horse. Like Mystic 100s and looking for grand scale thinking with an accessible touch? Theirs might be a door you wanna knock on. There's that type of shaggy n weary barroom lamentation that Neil Young does so well alongside expansive, open-ended guitar meditations that invariably look to Germany or Japan for guidance - good chance Battalene has heard a Naoki Zushi record or two, while the intuitive, unhurried structuring of the record as a whole put me in mind of those early iterations of Amon Duul or even Faust (see the zoned-out closer 'Ice Dream' for MM at their most ostentatiously kraut). A watched pot never boils, right? Now might be the time to look in on them. Nine albums in and Mountain Movers are steaming.
