Mountain Man – Magic Ship
Bella Union – 21 September 2018
Eight years ago, Amelia Meath, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Molly Sarlé released their debut album, Made The Harbor, to critical acclaim and, following the accompanying tour, all scattered to different parts of the world and different ends, including a Zen centre and a farm. Fate eventually brought them back together in North Carolina and, last summer, they finally reunited as a band for a small forest festival in Wisconsin.
Spurred by the response and the enjoyment of playing together again, they finally got round to making their follow-up, a collection of eleven originals, two covers and a traditional number, all, once again, firmly rooted in mountain folk soil and performed either totally unaccompanied or with only the sparest of acoustic guitar.
It opens with two vocally naked and intimate a capella numbers with Sarlé featuring on the 56-second Window while all three harmonise on the playground-like, lyrically whimsical AGT with its mention of spiders, honeybees and bumblefriends. Strummed guitar makes an entrance with the crooned take on Ted Lucas’s love song Baby Where You Are, hanging around to add some bluesy notes to the equally playful Rang Tang Ring Toon, again with Sauser-Monnig in the vocal spotlight.
With Meath backed by wordless mmm-ing, Stella has a lovely coyness to its refrain “come on Stella get in the house” refrain, the unaccompanied three-part harmony approach continuing on Michael Hurley’s reverie of nature Blue Mountain. Returning to self-penned material and resonantly struck guitar chords, Moon, which, Sarlé upfront, sees the vocals in more strident sonic form, conjuring a Gillian Welch, Roches and McGarrigles cocktail.
Things calm down for Boat, the voices gradually joining one another on a song about a boat offering transition, physically or in metaphorical terms of mortality. They stay around water for the next two numbers, Whale Song with its background chirps, a sort of folk spiritual with a wordless cooed refrain and the waltzing guitar-accompanied Fish.
The folk spiritual traditional also informs the a cappella simple life Underwear where, taking a verse each, they respectively enumerate all they need in this world (two pairs of underwear, my mother’s old t-shirt, my dad’s old blue jeans) before heading into the final stretch with Sarlé on the strummed, dreamily yearning Slow Wake Up Sunday Morning perfectly capturing the ambience evoked in the title, before Sarlé, extending the temporal theme with a chapel in the woods rendition of the traditional hymn Bright Morning Stars.
They end as they began, with another a capella 56-second song, Guilt, with time bringing a note of self-acceptance as Meath sings how “it could just be something that happened that way that makes you who you are today and it hurts, but that’s all right.”
Beguilingly simple, at times childlike at others worldly-wise, Magic Ship is a bewitching album; you should book your passage forthwith.