The Mountaineers - 'Motions Of Interplanetary Dust EP' (Northern Ambition) Released 21/02/05

 

Ok, ok this limited edition EP isn't technically an album. But we'll treat it as such because it's essentially a sampler of The Mountaineers' new LP, in the hope someone will be impressed enough to put the whole album out.

Should they? Lets take it track by track. 'Spoken To The Future' is The Mountaineers at their best - immediately accessible, yet expansive at the same time.The song marries a thumping guitar riff to a strong keyboard melody for an anthemic chorus - and features the kind of synth flourishes that evoke halcyon days of Casio keyboards bought from Argos for any self-respecting twenty-something.

After this powerful opener, the next two tracks, 'Everything' and 'I Would Go Anywhere With You', strike a much different chord. 'Everything' sounds exactly like a Victorian Circus, complete with impressively mustashioed men bellowing, ‘Roll-up! Roll-Up!’With its wistful air, bossa nova beat and eerie coda 'Everything' is a strikingly atmospheric track - if not necessarily an immediately memorable one.

The Mountaineers' are admirably never afraid to reveal their feminine side, and 'I Would Go Anywhere With You' encapsulates their tender underbelly. Singer Alex Germains belies his robust nature by squeezing his eyes shut to smoulder through this beautifully gentle, aching love song. The romanticism is given a bittersweet twist however, with the concluding refrain, “What’s mine is hers, is hers, is hers,” melting into, “it hurts, it hurts.”

Final track 'Do You Know, Do You Know' returns to the urgency of the EP’s first track. An opening crescendo makes the listener feel like they're falling, before a pulsating chorus - complete with warped, almost rave-esque, keyboards and on-the-button drums - sweeps them back up again.

Germains’ vital delivery compliments the song's abrasive feel. His raw vocals demand, “Get the flicker off my screen right before my eyes/ I’ve seen enough,” before a rush of words express dissatisfaction at all around him. Even the "Queen’s obscene”.

Such conviction lends the EP's conclusion an impressively impassioned guild - demonstrating how life following their debut album Messy Century has roughed up The Mountaineers and their sound - which, by this evidence, has a great deal of life left in it.

Someone put the record out!