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Reviews
23 June, 2009
Mountaineater and Emergency+Phone June 12 at Refuel
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It was a fairly inauspicious start to that of Mountaineater’s national tour. At most the crowd was about 60 people.

Emergency + Phone were there in support of the main act. They could be called “art pop” to describe them. Made up of Anthonie Tonnon (guitar, vocals), Chris Miller (bass, vocals), Chris Bull (guitar, vocals) and Reuben Stoddard (drums), they are all competent musicians who have been cobbled together from different prominent student bands. Miller and Tonnon are from The Finance Company and I think Reuben is in Soulseller.

Many correlations could be drawn between Tono and The Finance Company and Emergency + Phone. The latter though have branched off from the sweet poppy bouncy melancholy sounds of The Finance Company to something much more progressive and somewhat experimental. That is how they started their set that night. When playing this weird sort of stuff it sounds much more progressive and Floydesque almost. When they go off on those weird tangents that stretch the boundaries of the instruments they are playing, the lyrics become unintelligible, or perhaps that is the point, I'm not sure, or perhaps the words coming out of Chris Miller's mouth then were not important. I don't know whether I like this new progressive stuff perhaps because it confuses you to a degree as there is no structure and you don't know what will come next.

Then they shifted into their more easy listening melancholy pop/rock. One feature of note of the band is their vocal harmonies that everyone but the drummer seems to get in on. I like the sound of harmonising within a modern pop band. Its hard to describe what they sound like but it could be The Fratellis. They also shift over into the art-pop state similar to that of Lawrence Arabia. Tono then at the end of their set delighted us with a bit of scatting, which you don't hear much anymore outside jazz bands.

Mountaineater then came on to much acclaim from the crowd. They were really loud and very bassy. They couldn’t be called really heavy metal, more really hard rock with some synth laid in. Normally I am not exactly fond of really loud screamo death metal but you couldn’t really put Mountaineater in that pigeonhole. Everything vibrates with the bass though and it sort of ripples through you. They painted an aural soundscape and listening to Mountaineater live is a physical experience, like being caught in a wave, getting tumbled over and over. They manage to arise within you visceral, base and primitive feelings. I tried to put them into some sort of context and they do have some sort of similarity with Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. They have what could be called a dense, layered and reverberant sound in common with what Spector laid down in the studio. At the end of their song Exegesis 7, the extended strobe created the effect of wall of sound coming towards you inexorably and you couldn’t escape from it.

I dunno about Mountaineater. It is an incredible experience to see them live and have taken their new release
7 inch LP of Mata and Sun Fired. All I say is take earplugs because they will most probably literally blow your mind.

AK

Posted by scott

Posted by scott
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