mt. marcy - tied together
(2017 Self-Released)
The car keys claw their bookshelf roost. Your ritual slice of sprouted-wheat toast scoffs with disapproval as the butter knife drags a pat of butter across its coarse skin. Windshield wipers wrench a night's worth of frozen accumulation from your field of vision.
Mornings are a litany of scrapes, and Pittsburgh's Mt. Marcy is devoutly connected to their AM ambience. His newest EP release, Tied Together, irons out the lo-fi wrinkles of earlier jazz-sampling hip-hop efforts, trading jaunty slabs of piano-based crunch for more breathable folk-pop pastures. "for sure", for example, is composed of little more than meditative acoustic guitar loops and the field-recorded clatter they accompany, yet it communicates a potential vastness. It's a song you can step out of the house to. It holds the door for you.
"sometimes" is a little more intimate than its forerunner. The sounds of swishing corduroy pants and throat-clearing form a canvas for its guitaristry, glued together with dots of harmonics that suggest the post-rock constructions of Acid Aura, or Unwed Sailor's The White Ox.
mt. marcy saves his best for last on "talking to you", taking to the keyboard to flesh out his stringy arrangements. It's effortlessly calculated, like the careful way one drives to work without giving much through to the traffic. tied together is static music for the autopilot spirit: life-affirmingly unchanging.
