2018 Roundup // Mountain Man - Magic Ship

2018 is coming to a close and we here at We Hate Music would like to highlight some of the records that slipped through the cracks. Happy Holidays and hope you enjoy.

September 21, 2018 - Nonesuch Records

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. 

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

— Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

I remember the first time I was introduced to Mountain Man. I went to see Jónsi perform in Atlanta nine years ago, and they opened for him that night. Three women walked onto the stage, no instruments, standing still, calm, small, swallowed whole by the space around them. After a lone note on a pitch pipe, their acappella voices filled the room around us with a harmony so clear and perfect it sounded better than anything a sound engineer could produce in a studio. The effect was like the supernatural sheen of a great painting, how it feels larger than life in its imitation of life, more alive than life itself. I fell in love. 

Up until 2018, they had only released one album together (Made The Harbor, 2010, Bella Union). But, Magic Ship is worth the decade of waiting. It is an album full of new tradition continuing old tradition, identity, growth and empowerment in becoming. Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and Amelia Randall Meath weave Appalachian folk classics with new originals written in a magical realism that is simple, playful and sincere. Like the folk songs of old, the voice is prima donna, instrumentation is minimal, and nature imagery communicates truths of human existence with a matter-of-fact awareness. The melodies will remind you that your heart is broken and has been breaking since the day you were born. Then, the words will remind you that the brokenness is what gives you life. Far from today’s standard, watered-down Indie Folk, this music is made by three women who completely understand and command the folk genre to speak to the modern audience. It heals with the honesty of sage wisdom and a connection to history and context. 

There is a recurring water theme throughout Magic Ship, heightened two thirds of the way through with a consecutive string of songs featuring maritime imagery, ‘Boat,’ ‘Whale Song’ and ‘Fish.’ All three are loosely narrative in succession, ballad-like. A boat and the open water, both long symbols of deliverance, are fitting cultural bookends supporting the second recurring theme on the album: becoming who you want to be and finding empowerment in that choice, regardless of what society prescribes you should be doing. As said in ‘ATG,’ “I choose the life I choose to lead, but what but how but why but where, reaching out I find the air.”

A few other highlights include a tender singsong croon of a mother calling her child in ‘Stella,’ the blissful romance of ‘Moon,’ and ‘Rang Tang Ring Toon,’ an addictive little party song. Both tracks provide quick glimpses into that life Mountain Man has discovered, where time moves at an even pace, children build hidden worlds screen-free all day long in the yard, friends come over in the summertime for dinner and watch thunderstorms on your porch, and watching the change in the plants around you is essential to your routine. 

As a transplant who hails from the American South, I know my vision relies on rosy lenses that are inevitably biased toward connecting with and painting sunsets out of the moments in Magic Ship. I feel deeply rooted in this music. But Mountain Man is not presenting a romantically simple present that is devoid of pain. ‘Slow Wake Up Sunday Morning,’ sings of a couple sleeping in as long as they can, avoiding that inevitable moment when they have to face the day, the truth they don’t want to face about each other. And ‘Blue Mountain’ speaks the lament of someone who is aging and realizing the things they will never be able to experience again. 

Authenticity and the self-awareness to write about experience and express without abandon is the power enclosed. There are moments when the poetry awkwardly stumbles through an emotion, difficult to comprehend, followed by moments of brilliant metaphors that enlighten the human condition. Magic Ship and all of Mountain Man’s work is literally a modern continuation of an ancient musical tradition. People have been coping with life’s inevitable joys and sufferings by singing about it in unison since the first song was ever composed. ☔