Pygmy Lush - Mount Hope

Mount Hope

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Tracklist:
1) Asphalt
2) No Feeling
3) Dead Don't Pass
4) God Condition
5) Red Room Blues
6) Mount Hope
7) Frozen Man
8) Hard To Swallow
9) Concrete Mountain
10) Dreams Are Class
11) Butch's Dream
12) Tumor

Pygmy Lush are an odd bunch. As one of these pretentious music types I like to think that a few samples of a song off a band's myspace or a few listens of their last.fm page will tell me all I need to know to make a fairly quick judgement that will decide whether I will or won't listen to that band again. Never before however have I gone to a band's myspace and not known whether I will be treated to eight minutes of folk bliss or two and a half minutes of screamo.

Mount Hope, you may or may not be pleased to hear, is completely void of the latter, and spends three quarters of an hour treating the listener to what can only be described as blissful acoustic lullabies (I've got time, though, so i'll try and describe it as something else as well). I generally don't have any time for folk music, too often I personally find it slightly meandering and pointless, (says the Post-Rock fan) but Mount Hope is pretty much spot on. There's moody guitar rumbling in the likes of Asphalt, the one man and his dog anthem of Dead Don't Pass, and the backroom bar shuffle of the album's title track. Where Mount Hope shines, though, is in it's extended pieces, the likes of Red Room Blues, which starts out standard enough and descends into a Pink Floyd esque haze, and the frankly flawless album closer, Tumor. Everything on offer here is brilliantly emotional, but still retains some subtlety. More importantly, everything on offer here is beautiful. I'll not pretend to know the reasoning for a screamo band branching out into lo-fi folk music, but it could have been so easy to make a half baked Tom Waits pastiche here. Instead, Pygmy Lush (what a great name, by the way) have maken an album that is unique, brilliant and beautiful, and borrows elements even from the folk artist everyone can get behind; Bon Iver. Even at that, though, vocals are muffled, dark, and the acoustic guitars are wonderfully forlorn.

As previously mentioned, or not mentioned but what you should have taken from this, Mount Hope isn't really going to get the party started. It's one to stick on late at night, after one too many glasses of wine, when you can feel your cheeks getting a bit red. Or play it in iTunes and have a lie down. Or put it on after watching Forrest Gump.

I'll review something happy soon, I promise.

8.7/10