Daniel Shoemaker Photo
Mountain Movers at Cafe Nine in 2018.
“I Wanna See the Sun,” the first track from World What World, the new album from New Haven-based underground anchors The Mountain Movers, starts right where the band’s previous full-length release, Pink Skies, left off. There’s the powerful, elemental rhythm section of Ross Menze on drums and Rick Omonte on bass. There’s Dan Greene’s surging rhythm guide, his voice and elliptical lyrics serving as a guide through the band’s sonic landscape. And there’s Kryssi Battalene’s guitar, first prowling in the background, them roaring to the front in the song’s second half like a howling storm.
Cover of World What World.
As a recording band, the Mountain Movers have had the same lineup since 2015’s Death Magic. The sound that the four-piece created on that album was something of a departure for previous projects songwriter Dan Greene had done under the Mountain Movers moniker, but in hindsight pointed the way forward. Six releases later, that 2015 album appears to have outlined the borders of a vast musical territory that the band has been exploring ever since. With every release, the sound of the band grows, the sense of both space and density in the music becomes more amplified. You could say that over time the band is becoming truer to its name.
So “Final Sunset,” the next song, drops the listener in mid-jam, with Battalene’s guitar already in full squall while Omonte moves the music forward with a pulsing bassline and Menze keeps it steady on the drums. But “Then the Moon” begins as a slow waltz that starts sparse and develops into a hazy lushness before turning a corner into waves of sound that succeed in being somehow both gauzy and muddy. “Haunted Eyes” is dreamy and summery, with Greene’s and Battalene’s guitars combining to create a fuzzy idyll.
“Staggering with a Lantern,” meanwhile, captured the Mountain Movers’ sound as New Haveners who have been to their live shows know it. It’s a song meant to be heard loud, as loud as one can stand, the song melting away around Battalene’s mesmerizing feedback work. “Way Back to the World” is a strutting anthem with a texture between the guitars to get lost in. “The Last City” moves even further into the shifting musical territory the band found their way into on “Staggering with a Lantern.” And “Flock of Swans” is the kind of song you can dance to, even when its melody gives way to flowing curtains of guitars from Battalene and Greene, only to end on the friendliest of major chords to pin it all down.
Mountain Movers makes a sound that isn’t quite like anyone else, and World What World shows that as a band, they’re still climbing, still moving.
World What World by the Mountain Movers is available on Bandcamp.
