A Grave With No Name

"Mountain Debris"

14 December 2009, 07:59 | Written by Rich Hughes

(Albums)

(A Grave With No Name)

A dark, fuzzy cloud of influences hangs over the debut record by A Grave With No Name. Apart from the fact that they’ve come up with one of the best band names for sometime, this is a confused and dense mixture of music. That’s not saying that this is a failure, quite the contrary in fact, but at times it can feel like a tick-list of influences ”“ from the Velvet Underground right through to The Microphones and Grizzly Bear. There’s also a mere hint of one of the great forgotten acts from Creation Records, Arnold, in their lo-fi recordings.The sixteen tracks that make up Mountain Debris are an even split between whispered vocals, shoe-gazing drones and pretty, sparse instrumental passages. ‘Open Water’ wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House with it’s gentle hushed rhythms and high pitched chants. ‘Silver’, on the other hand, is all condensed beats and scuzzy vocals that sound like it was recorded in a bathroom. ‘The Passing of the Day’ is a beautiful submariners dream, all clinking bottles and crashing waves over a aching lovely acoustic guitar before it flows into ‘Stone Setting’, one of the standout tracks. Sounding not unlike the Velvet Underground dreaming about Beach House covering Emeralds ”“ it’s gentle, dreamy and pieced together, focused by some more acoustic guitars. The peace is shattered by the ramshackle stream of consciousness that is ‘Horses’. A cackling, evil-Clown twin to the previous track, it’s the sound of a band falling down a well whilst endeavouring to record the process. Also keen to show their more love-lorn and folk-tinged side, the final two tracks ‘Underpass’ and ‘The River Path’ are like early Neil Young in their simplicity and strained vocals. Conjuring up images of floral pastures and meandering streams with their simplistic and repetitive vocals, they’re not going match Young in that aspect, but it’s a quiet and simplistic end.No two tracks are the same; the scope of this album is amazingly varied. It’s also infuriatingly hard to pin this beast down. It’s an enthralling, frustrating and challenging listen. What we have here is a band that just want to record whatever they want, which is amazing. However, like a book that needs a good editor to help reveal its hidden beauty amongst the dense prose, Mountain Debris needs someone to help focus all the ideas into a more concise work. If that had been the case, we’d be looking at a classic debut. Instead, we’re left with a band that show plenty of promise and a hope that they can develop into a very important act.