Mountain Movers Take To The Sky

“This City,” from the New Haven-based Mountain Movers’ recently released album, Pink Skies, starts with an ominous, churning rhythm from guitarist Dan Greene, bassist Rick Omonte, and drummer Ross Menze, while lead guitarist Kryssi Battalene lets out a pulsing alarm from her guitar. Together they establish a complex mood in an instant, somehow peaceful and tense at the same time, dense and heavy yet expansive and atmospheric.

“‘Time out,’ I said / ​‘Hold on,’ I said,” Greene sing-speaks. ​“We’re going two steps at a time / You’ve got to decide if you want the old way or the new way / The sun belongs to you / And so does the sky / The living and the dead / They both walk through this city.”

The lyrics point to everything and nothing. They show Greene’s practiced hand as a songwriter, and the obvious chemistry among its members — a chemistry that, as it turns out, was a decade in the making.

“I had a band winding down, and I had a bunch of songs, and I wanted to keep making music,” Greene said in an interview on WNHH’s Northern Remedy. ​“I ran into this guy and I said, ​‘I have these songs, but I’m not very sure how to get started.’ And he said, ​‘I play bass.’ I said, ​‘cool. How about tomorrow?’ And he said, ​‘yeah, that sounds good.’”

The band that was winding down, in 2004, was indie darling The Butterflies of Love, which was formed in New Haven in the 1990s and saw local and international success for a time. And ​“this guy” was Rick Omonte, who — also in the 1990s — had a successful run playing bass in New Haven-based ska band Spring Heeled Jack and by the 2000s was a quiet fixture of the New Haven music scene.

Omonte remembered connecting with Greene in the same way, but also different. ​“I was good friends with Scott Amore — still am,” Omonte said. Amore had played keyboards in Butterflies of Love. ​“I was in between some things, and Scott was in between some things, so we kept hanging out…. We would go on trips together. We had a cassette deck. He had this cassette and he would play it.” Omonte was impressed by the songs he heard. ​“Are these Butterflies songs? These are amazing,” he told Amore.

“No, these are songs we rejected and Dan just records,” Omonte recalled Amore saying. ​“And I said, ​‘you guys are crazy. I don’t know how these songs get rejected.’”

“We run a tight ship,” was Amore’s reply, Omonte said. ​“And I said, ​‘all right, whatever. You tell your boy if he’s ever interested, I play the bass.’”

Then Amore started getting busy again. Omonte and Greene started playing together, and started working on songs. Then they thought about how to flesh them out. ​“We just ran into friends in town that could help us do that,” Greene said. ​“I just knew them as really good musicians, so I tried to get to the songs going and let them do what they so, and see how it turned out.” 

They ended up with a six-piece band: Greene on guitar, Omonte on bass, Erik Elligers and John Panos on sax and trumpet, Rob Katz on keys, and John Miller on drums. The band had a big sound. They decided to make a record, 2006’s We’ve Walked in Hell and There is Life After Death, which was a ​“studio thing,” Greene said. He had a group of ​“24 songs that we whittled down to 12,” Omonte said. Amore produced the record.

But that led to shows. ​“We were a band — we played tons of gigs and we made a couple records.” They released Let’s Open Up the Chest in 2008. ​“It was moving in a more guitar direction, but still had the horns and the organ.”

“It was a super-organic kind of band” by that time, Omonte said. They captured the sound of ​“that band growing into what it was supposed to be in the first place,” Greene said.

“And then we started doing something else,” Greene said.

Katz, Elligers and Panos had other projects that were calling for their attention. People moved out of town. Joey Maddalena stepped in on guitar. They became a more rock-oriented four piece, and recorded The Day Calls Out For You in 2009.

But more changes were still afoot. The four-piece became a three-piece for 2010’s Apple Mountain, which found drummer John Miller moving away from the drums and into recording and engineering.

Then Greene and Omonte met Kryssi Battalene. Battalene was one of the people putting on shows at the now-defunct DIY space Popeye’s Garage. She had a noise project called Colorguard.

“I remember there were a couple of recommendations,” Omonte said, people saying ​“you should jam with Kryssi.” Battalene was interested in playing guitar, and she joined Greene and Omonte as a trio. ​“It was mostly just me, Rick, and her for a while. We were mostly just playing art spaces,” Greene said. But Battalene was friends with Ross Menze, who was playing in a couple different bands at the time. Greene heard him play and thought ​“he was spectacular as a drummer. We just started playing together and stuck it out.”

The chemistry among the four members happened quickly. Omonte and Menze proved to be a rhythm section that could sound huge. Battalene’s approach to the guitar was somehow serene and exploding with energy simultaneously. Together, the four of them expanded the sound. They released Death Magic in 2015 and the eponymous Mountain Movers in 2017. And now Pink Skies.

“We’re a family, basically. We talk like that. We egg on each other. We know how to push each other’s buttons. And now it’s been a while,” Greene said. ​“Eight years we’ve been this unit, and I feel super-lucky to have genuine relationships with the people I play with. It makes all the chemistry of playing so much easier.”

It’s easy in part because Greene continues to be as prolific a songwriter as ever, writing and recording material steadily. He brings only some of those songs to the band.

“He usually just shows up and says, ​‘This one kind of goes like this.’ He plays some chords and sings through it a little bit, and we usually just try to jump in.” Omonte said.

“We play it once,” Greene said. Then the band members decide if they want to play it again. ​“Then we play it kind of the way it’s going to be. By the third time it’s just the decision of whether you want to push on to the next one.” They try a few songs every practice. Over time, they figure out which songs stick, and play those songs live at their shows.

“The way that we go about these things seems to be changing,” Omonte said, ​“because of the improvisational element.” Sometimes band practice is about songs. Sometimes it’s just about jamming, with the jams started by any one of the four of them. They record a lot of material with Miller and listen back. Sometimes they pair jams or certain musical approaches with songs and work it out from there. They work out what songs they like best, record them, and move on when they’re ready for new songs, new approaches. And so the past few albums, Pink Skies included, become a document simply of where the band is at the moment they record them. Six months later, the music has already changed.

“I’ve basically operated my whole life on that idea,” Greene said with a chuckle. ​“The way I’ve always recorded is to do it as fast as possible after I wrote the song. Just write the song and immediately record it, and then forget about it, and then move on…. The more immediate the recording, the more I’m going to be on the wire, and the more it could possibly get interesting.”

“The fantasy,” Omonte said, ​“is that if you could press record right after the best time you’ve had it at your practice, that would be the best.” It’s why Miller is still a band member as engineer. The band decamps to Miller’s home in Shelton and records a lot of material, and sorts it out. ​“Sometimes we go to record, and it’s a snowstorm and we get stuck there,” Omonte said. ​“It’s magical, and it’s how we get those recordings.”

But the Mountain Movers are also grown out of New Haven’s scene. To Greene, the scene gathers its inspiration from the music all over New England, but also the mix of musical genres in the city itself. ​“I do think it happens that New Haven has a pretty good underground scene, has had a good experimental scene, on many fronts, from punk shows to noise shows and everything in between, to interesting folk shows,” Greene said.

“Let’s not lie, there are some haters out there, hating on Connecticut,” Omonte added. ​“I love to prove people wrong…. New Haven proves a lot of people wrong, but it’s a funny place, and you got to a lot of times dig beneath…. But I think all of these contribute to how people make art here.”

“There’s something that drives all of us to say, ​‘hey, we’re awesome. This is New Haven,’” he added. ​“If you know, you know.” When he books shows, he’s heard touring bands comment on how warm and supportive the audience can be. ​“People are lifers, if they like you. It’s that community.”

To listen to the full interview with Dan Greene and Rick Omonte on ​“Northern Remedy,” click on the file below.