Mountaineater Album Review

Mountaineater are one of the few bands around that manage to somehow sound like their name. Slowly building up layers of sound, with rumbling bass and relentless rhythms, you can almost imagine a mountain crumbling away at the sheer intensity of this sonic assault.

Their debut self-titled album has taken a long time to see the light of day, but after hearing it I have to say it’s been worth the wait. Despite several of the tracks being available online and on various 7” discs over the past few years, there’s something different about hearing them in the context of the album; they seem to have a new lease of life, offering a new perspective, and serving to elevate each of the tracks beyond what they were as singles online.

Lord of Sumo, one of the newer tracks, and the first single from the album, is a real standout – despite a couple of the older songs being firm favourites of mine. The song is poppier than the older material, although pop being a relative term here, and lends itself well to being a single; at the same time, it’s unmistakably the sound of Mountaineater, a sound grounded in the heyday of the Dunedin sound, but never dwelling within that era.

This is a slow smouldering album, full of huge songs, and it’s an album that deserves full attention, lest you miss the subtleties amongst the onslaught of sound.  In a year of massive local albums, this is right up near the top of my list, and one I’ll be coming back to repeatedly.