Mountainscape
Atoms Unfurling

Insomnia is a nasty beast (1); I'm quite used to it by now, I've been living with it for years. And even tonight I suffered from it but came out refreshed, because during my wandering on YouTube in search of some musical novelty, I happened to stumble upon the second album by the English band Mountainscape. It was first and foremost the iconic cover image that captured my "unstable" mind: a rarefied mountain landscape, immersed in colors that become clearer, brighter, and colder as they rise, still maintaining a mysterious and sinister aura, especially thanks to that blurred image of a person advancing towards you.

As has been happening for months, it's the much-loved instrumental Post-Rock that rewards my nocturnal and sleepy, yet lucid, attention.

Instrumental Post-Rock is also a nasty beast (2). Not easy to handle; it's likewise difficult to be credible in a musical genre now flooded with dozens and dozens of unfortunately "all the same" bands, all derivative without a minimum of personality.

Catching the listener's attention, being credible solely with the mastery of instruments without using the voice and words of a singer is a task that's sometimes colossal. Being able to convey with musical notes the images that are derived from each single track is an articulated, complex work, and the English succeed in their intent, at least from my point of view. This, to conclude my long introductory preamble, is an exceptional album that managed to win me over from the very first listen this night.

As always, given my total ignorance from a technical point of view (don't ask me with which tuning the guitars are set or if the drums propose four-time settings or broken rhythms), I absolutely have to refer to some bands I’ve known for decades to which Mountainscape surely refer.

And so, it’s very easy for me to mention Pelican for the circularity of the sounds, Russian Circles for the continuous changes of register and rhythm, moving from ambient moments of infinite delicacy to progressive forward jumps, where the metallic component of the sound is put into powerful evidence. Lastly, but no less importantly, allow me to mention the much-missed Isis thanks to some instrumental phrasings with a very clear Dark aftertaste..."very clear Dark aftertaste" is gorgeous, come on...ahahahahaha...

The long title track stands out as the best track of the batch: a first phase where everything is restrained, where the sounds are sweet, pastoral...but you know that sooner or later a change will occur...which comes from the depths, from afar like a tsunami that eventually explodes with a primal violence that shakes my soul. An overwhelming catharsis, an extraordinary surge of energy that comes at the right time and is able to withstand any competition with the bands I've just mentioned a few lines above.

Ad Maiora.