The Metrics of One – When Mountains Speak (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Wait! What’s this? I’m so used to being immediately immersed in drifting sonics and off-kilter cascades of guitar sounds when diving headfirst into a When Mountains Speak album (and diving in head first is the only way to approach such music) that as the funky beats, the chiming piano and the liquid and languid, sensual and seductive saxophone of Slump come together in an opening attack of groovy, slightly free-form jazz array, it is almost enough to make me go back and check that you are playing the right album.

But that is the great thing about Steven Clarkson’s approach to music and the attitudes that drive When Mountains Speak, nothing is off limits, and if the last thing you heard was built around a collection of squalling, prog-rock-infused six-string salvos, there is nothing to say that the next piece, as proven with this opening track, might not be something completely different. It also makes you wonder where he might go next.

Well, the answer, in this case, is Love All, a more wilfully dissonant (who is to say where melody ends and noise starts, what is art and what is music, discuss….) and sonorous piece built on robotic background sounds and coiling and careening riffs.

But none of what has gone before really prepares you for Bass Confessions, a track that isn’t particularly bass-driven, not in the conventional sense of groove and propulsion. And if it confesses, it does so in a way that still holds those secrets close. The titular four-string can be heard wandering through the song, but shards of angular piano and swampy guitars are more the order of the day.

And talking of guitars, this new album, The Metrics of One, marks the first outing for Steven’s latest purchase, a Kaizen 7-string guitar. Taking its name from a democratic, mutually beneficial Japanese business approach, these guitars are designed for maximum playability and comfort, and it is safe to say that he is having not only a whale of a time but also a wail of a time, drawing new and exotic sounds from his latest addition to the musical arsenal.

The title track, in particular, is centred on the shamanistic drawing out of said guitar’s potential. Skittering beats and exploratory bass runs create a mercurial backdrop as 7-string counter melodies, and occasionally anti-melodies, non-melodies and fractured melodies, deftly dance and primally scream over the top.

Neptunes Trail, a piece described as an interlude, is actually one of the longest pieces on the album, which tells you everything you need to know, if the music hasn’t already, about Steven’s approach to convention. The song turns out to be an aquatic deep dive through the watery underworld; sonic tides ebb and flow, the squelching guitars add the necessary intensity to simulate the effects of the pressure at such depths, and the saxophone seems to dart and shoal and scatter and regroup like the realm’s deep-sea denizens.

The album rounds off with Fate of Proximity, a song that moves from gnashing industrial carnage to more focused sounds as it travels. The song scatters ideas around, moving between the intrigue of the noir-thriller soundtrack, a jazz-infused space oddity, and tumbling and challenging modern classical piano arrangements, all shifting and changing like the colours of a child kaleidoscope.

I can’t think of another band I have written about this often where I still find so much new to say with each release. Something that says less about me as a writer and so much about the inventive, experimental, boundary-pushing, and exploratory nature of the music of When Mountains Speak.