Album Focus: Mt Mountain

Mt Mountain launch their debut album, Cosmos Terros, on Saturday May 14, at the Rosemount Hotel with help from Tangled Thoughts of Leaving, Skullcave and Erasers. Alex Griffin reports.

To hear guitarist Glenn Palmer tell it, Mt Mountain’s steady ascent to their place as one of Australia’s bleariest psych bands has been less a K2 climb than it has floating uphill.

The Perth five-piece, who blend desert rock, hard blues, and shamanistic drone into a boiling, dusty moonshake, they’ve had good fortune to match the effort and precision of their tight, roiling songs with things just coming together everywhere else.

Take how they came to nab the miasmic and striking cover art for Cosmos Terros, for example; it came courtesy of the respected NYC sculptor, Paul Kaptein, after more or less falling out of the clouds. “Originally, I just saw it on my Instagram feed!” Palmer exclaims, “but then it clicked, his surname – he’s my friend’s girlfriend’s uncle, randomly enough. We had been looking for a cover, and we all felt the picture was perfect straight away, so just as he was having an exhibition we asked her if she could run the idea past him. He was down, so we emailed him, and then it was done! We didn’t even have to edit the image.”
Recording the impassive and occasionally crushing Cosmos Terros came about through the same kind of serendipity. Producer Broderick Madden-Scott also worked with the band on 2014’s breakout Chantry 7”, the sessions for which were the start of Cosmos Terros. When it came to hooking up with Brod, “it just kinda happened! We’d played a lot of shows with Spaceman and become friends, and always talked about recording with him next, trying to do a seven-inch and then an album, and as soon as we got in the room everything just snowballed. We ended up recording way more than the song or two we expected to. Like, four or five songs later…”

The boys’ first national tour, in support of respected German heavyweights Kadavar (“we’re super, super excited”), developed in similar fashion. “Dave Cutbush had been pushing us for a long time to do a tour, and we mentioned some dates we were planning to play in Melbourne. He said, ‘well, maybe not, I’ve got Kadavar booked the same night in Melbourne; why not do the full support with them', which was way too good to pass up. We’ve been itching to go for a long time.”

Looking back on the three years they’ve been playing, the highlights aren’t hard to see for Palmer. “Opening for OM was pretty unreal,” he recalls. “A band we’d all been listening to for years, especially when we’d only been playing for a year or so. None of us had played shows or been in a band before. And then there was the EP launch at the Rosemount in 2014, which is probably still the best reception we’ve ever had at a show. We weren’t too confident because it’s such a big venue, but we had more than what we expected turn out, so we were pretty blown away, it was unforgettable.”

If things have been clicking into gear externally for the band, it’s only because of what happens when they click together, with all the material built up from scratch in the jam room. “We jam every week; someone will have a bass line, and we just write it together in the room. When we’ve tried to do it any other way, like one person writing the majority of a song, it doesn’t feel as natural or come out as well. We’ve moved way more towards just jamming everything out as a group instead of trying to preconceive anything.”

If moving by intuition has served Mt Mountain this well so far, looks like they’re set for the summit.

Originally published in X-Press Magazine