Adam Ross – Staring at Mountains
Olive Grove Records – Out Now
Adam Ross has often experimented with the notion of the band and what it means to perform as part of a group rather than as a solo artist. Consequently, his group, Randolph’s Leap, have been everything from an eight-piece indie-folk collective to a King Creosote-esque one-man band. But up until now, it has always been under the Randolph’s Leap name. Staring At Mountains sees him leave behind the fleshed-out arrangements, instead opting for a more pared-back approach, with just a fiddle (Pedro Cameron) and some backing vocals (Jenny Sturgeon) to accompany his acoustic guitar and voice. This change of direction symbolises a slight change of intent on Ross’s part. The new songs on Staring At Mountains are, in his own words, ‘more folky in tone and the lyrics are less tongue-in-cheek’ than much of his previous work. It’s a shift that reflects, in part, Ross’s growing recognition of his place within the natural landscape of his native Scotland.
Cairngorm is a delicate ode to the pleasures of mountainsides and peaks ‘where rock and air combine’. Under The Radar is a beautiful, fiddle-tinged celebration of the outdoors but also a sad lament for the loss of natural habitats. Jenny Sturgeon, whose subtle but uplifting backing vocals augment this and a number of the album’s other tracks, is the perfect choice for a collaborator: her 2020 release The Living Mountain was a musical reaction to Nan Shepherd’s book of the same name, a book that brought the landscape of the Cairngorms to life in stunning, luminous detail. Ross’s mountain songs work on a similar principle to Shepherd’s prose and are a welcome addition to the literature of this unique mountain range.
There are intensely personal songs too: opener The Quiet Joys Of Parenthood (with Cameron’s fiddle high up in the mix alongside Ross’s conversational tones) deals wryly and poetically with the decision not to have children. Liar is simple conceit, dramatically delivered, a list of lies (or creative half-truths) that lead to an overarching truth – the authenticity of love. What Are You Doing? is that rare thing: a song about a friend’s alcohol problem that is neither preachy nor romanticised, just worried and human. Ross has a sure eye for the fallibilities of human nature, and he knows there are no easy answers. It’s a refreshingly honest approach.
Sanna is a logical meeting of the two themes of the personal and the natural. Inspired by Ross’s honeymoon and packed full of acutely detailed observations (a buzzard in a dead tree, shadows falling on a wooden crate, turnstones in the marram grass), it represents a kind of idyll. Asphalt uses walking and the Scottish countryside as a metaphor for life in a way that never feels too obvious or too forced. Ross can juxtapose an external landscape and an internalised emotion in a similar way to Iris DeMent or John Prine (who he acknowledges as an influence on this album).
More focussed narrative elements creep into Ross’s songs here and there: The Swell tells the story of Shieldhill, an abandoned fishing village near the hamlet of Kinneff in Aberdeenshire. Rather than giving us a historical account of the village’s demise, Ross takes us inside the head of one of its inhabitants, with sad and beautiful consequences. Alice & Christine, a kind of fictional biography, is characterised by Ross’s trademark humour, coming across like a mixture of Ray Davies and Ivor Cutler, brimful of inventive and often very clever rhymes. Closing track When The Music Ends is a perfectly observed rumination on the more bittersweet aspects of living as a touring musician.
Staring At Mountains is demonstrably an Adam Ross album rather than a Randolph’s Leap album, but that’s not a bad thing. We get to hear Ross at his most open: in its own quiet way, this is a strangely visceral album. The chamber-pop elements, the influences of bands like Belle and Sebastian or the Divine Comedy, have been replaced by something more difficult to define, a style that celebrates a certain clarity or translucence. This provides the richest and most detailed snapshot yet of the songwriting processes – and the thought processes – of one of Scotland’s most talented singers and songwriters.
You can order Staring at Mountains via Bandcamp here: https://randolphsleap.bandcamp.com/album/staring-at-mountains