The Brooklyn electro-acoustic duo Mountains have finally landed in a place as vast and awe-inspiring as the landforms they're named after. This is an album that causes you to view everything the band did before a little differently, turning 2011's Air Museum into a transitional piece, a necessary step in the build toward Centralia. Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg seem to alter their working methods with each passing release, choosing here to separately layer acoustic and electronic instruments, not manipulating the former with the latter. The technical details aren't too important; to pick apart who did what and where would cause Centralia to lose some of its magic. Instead, it's better to just fall into it, letting it wash over you again and again. The actual Centralia is a ghost town in Pennsylvania, a place with a population barely in double figures, condemned by a 1962 mine fire that made it largely uninhabitable. It couldn't be less appropriate as a title-- this Centralia is rich with connection, bustling with possibility. It's got life pulsing through it.
This is an album that finds Mountains expanding outward, replacing bungalows with steeples. Brian Howe noted that the duo "like a big canvas" in his review of Air Museum, but nothing from that album feels as all-encompassing as their work here. They've added a touch more movement to their music, with the perma-halt they get locked into mostly intact. But those changes in tone are often startling and moving when they appear. It's there in the unexpected rush of noise halfway through "Propeller", and in the lulling cello at the close of "Sand". Still, nothing resembles traditional song form, with Holtkamp and Anderegg finding strength in great circular drones, ring-shaped synth accents, and ruminative acoustic picking. Mostly it feels like more thought went into this work than prior Mountains records, with the inclination to spread themselves wide birthed through a rigorous attention to detail. There's a strong sense of objective and design, a feeling of being taken somewhere instead of getting deadlocked in one mood, one place.
That sense of creating shifting conditions is a key differentiator between this and any similar works. Centralia is primarily concerned with beauty and contact, creating hypnotic melodies that resonate with meaning as their looped paths uncoil. It's music to get lost in on a certain level, but you can feel pliable human emotions tugging hard on your shoulder throughout. Partly that's due to Mountains improving at integrating their earthy and otherworldly impulses. The acoustic plucking and blocky drones of "Circular C" don't feel like they're drawn from separate strains of thought, pushing folk traditions and analog synthesis together as if they were always meant to co-exist. Mountains' guitar work has often resembled Ben Chasny's Six Organs of Admittance output, and that remains a constant here, especially in "Tilt", a track that gathers poignancy as it gains momentum. Here, they're as skilled at change as they are at staying lost in time.
It's to Centralia's great credit that its 20-minute centerpiece, "Propeller", doesn't completely dwarf everything that comes before and after. "Propeller" is huge and masterful, the fullest embodiment of the "pure phase" aesthetic Jason Pierce was working toward on the Spiritualized album of the same name. The fact that it's a live recording, albeit one sweetened by a few studio tweaks, is particularly impressive considering the immaculate way all the parts twist around one another. It's here that the possibilities for this music seem boundless. This is music for wide open spaces, full of reach and depth. It's not exactly Mountains' gambit for the big time, but it is the kind of track that could open them up to a wider audience, principally because it takes what they do so well-- repetitive motions executed with ample emotional impact-- and blows it wide open. There are even a few power chords thrown into the following "Liana", further emphasizing the maximal strength Mountains have harvested for this release.
Holtkamp and Anderegg's bursts of robustness on Centralia don't quite tell the full story. It's matched by a tenderness that occasionally mirrors the kind of blues Dave Pajo was feeling circa Papa M's Live from a Shark Cage, and a hush that Jason Noble was reaching for in the post-classical outfit, Rachel's. There's a continuity between this and prior Mountains releases, but it's more grandiose than Choral, more focussed than Air Museum. In its longer stretches it's similar to the no-waste ethic of Swans' The Seer, where every tiny detail serves the bigger picture, where nothing in an ostensibly open-ended piece is allowed to drift unattached. Centralia is less severe than The Seer, but it's executed with the same unyielding desire to move and to feel. It's impressive how multi-purpose some of the tracks can be. You can zone out to the one-note drone that "Sand" arcs into for a while, only to be yanked somewhere else altogether when a great slide of strings pulls you down. That's the spot Mountains inhabit, in a capacious synchronization of the real and the unreal, a space they've gloriously matured into.
