Popcorn Noises

Mountain Man - Made the Harbor

We are allowed only one or two great folk albums each year. Maybe three if it’s been a rough winter. Strict limits of quality control must be respected and enforced because spare, honest, primarily acoustic music is something a lot of people attempt to very mediocre results. Of course, it’s easy to understand why. The minimalism and relatability built into folk music is an attractive jumping-off point for people who don’t have much knowhow, money, or experience, though these norms are surely changing (with the wide availability of advanced composition and recording software, bedroom synthpop is becoming as natural as a dude with a guitar).

As I see it, that state of musical minimalism is something every modern artist who dabbles in folk tradition must address, explicitly or otherwise. There are three stances you can take. One of the most common is to shirk minimalism and fill out your sound, making ‘folk’ just one of the hyphenated words in what you do. Popular acts like Sufjan Stevens, Grizzly Bear, and Fleet Foxes have all followed this route to construct their own successful styles. Others find themselves compelled to make lush, full-sounding music but are unable or unwilling to introduce a lot of new voices. This chafing against necessity (real or self-imposed) is where we get things like complex finger-picking and dense, poetic writing. Rarer yet are those artists who not only accept spareness but who turn it on its head, using it to their advantage instead of just trying not to apologize for it. Mountain Man, the Vermont trio of college housemates Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, Amelia Randall Meath, and Molly Erin Sarle, have garnered a lot of attention over the last year for doing exactly that.

To record Made the Harbor, Mountain Man split their time between a dusty old attic and an industrial warehouse that once housed an ice cream factory. The settings are ideal not just for their sonic character, but because of how they embody what the band does. Though most of these songs feature a muted acoustic guitar, Mountain Man are functionally an a-cappella group. They sing in close, creaky harmonies and only occasionally break up or stagger their voices rhythmically, which is important to note because it infuses the record with a sense of modesty. These three women are strong, capable singers and songwriters, but they’re not interested in the flashy acrobatics of a lot of vocal groups. They’re not afraid to sit still and take deep breaths between phrases, letting the guitar ring and the room reverb slowly decay against the low tape hiss. They leave wonderful ancillary sounds intact, too—a buzzing string, shuffling feet, a sniffle, a cue from the engineer, hands rubbed together, a giggle. This type of folk singing is nothing new (it’s very old, in fact), but seldom is it captured in such an unfiltered, immediately modern way.

Buzz-building songs “Animal Tracks” and “Dog Song” both get spruced up and rerecorded here, with “Tracks” speeding up a few clicks to become one of Harbor’s bounciest numbers and “Dog” bringing the guitar up and evening out the vocal dynamics (you can actually hear what they’re saying now!). Both are significant improvements over the original demos, but some of the newer tracks are even better. “Buffalo” opens the record with a fitting invitation—“Follow, follow, follow the buffalo”—and peters out on finger-picked guitar, while “White Heron” periodically drops its tempo for a stretched refrain. “Draw me still,” they intone between mournful odes to a hunted bird, “what you take away you can’t give back again.” Naturalism is all over Harbor, but Mountain Man are equally concerned with domestic environs and the tenuous, intimate connections between people. “Arabella” contains two of the band’s biggest fixations, dogs and houses. “Sweet Arabella howls in high pitches / The dog, she understands. We can’t,” they begin, highlighting a boundary between man and nature before slipping into dreams about “lost mothers’ instruments and metal fruit bowls.”

Prerelease track “Soft Skin” finds Mountain Man delving further into their house motif, invoking “cool green tiles in the kitchen” and rolling out of bed onto the floor, while personal favorite “Sewee Sewee” works a lovelorn ode around its bittersweet melody (“From a rocky stand I watched your bare feet running over salty land”). Two cover songs, The Mills Brothers’ “How’m I Doin’” and the traditional “Babylon,” add some historical heft to Harbor’s second half. Their version of “Doin’” is pretty faithful to the jazzy 40s pop of the old tune, but “Babylon” takes wider liberties, transforming the psalm into a dreamy round. “River Song” finishes the album on a playfully mysterious note, with rhythmic ‘oo-ooos’ propelling a minor key melody that ends with the trio winking “When all sing the same tune / oh, we will not remember you.”

Typing out the lyrics doesn’t always do these songs justice, since part of what makes Mountain Man great is the way their songs feel like spectral distillations of more complicated music. They don’t hint at or play with representations of intimacy, they are intimate. Between the stunning vocal dexterity of Meath, Sauser-Monnig, and Sarle, the warmth of their writing, and all that beautifully empty space, the only way we as listeners can respond is to lean in close.