Mountain Movers

Still the headiest thing rolling out of New Haven, if not the rest of the Northeast, Mountain Movers new album sees the Connecticut four-piece perfect their brand of heatwave psychedelia. Pink Skies works swimmingly as a companion to last year’s eponymous LP, extending their reach towards the heart of the sun and exemplifying the unrestrained heat of their live sets. Though the band doesn’t revel in nearly enough fanfare for their cathartic cache of six previous mind-flayers, their scorched n’ singed delivery should have this climbing to the top of psych heads’ most anticipated releases. Guitarist Kryssi Battalene is funneling an overdose of ozone-toasted radiation through the speakers, distorting reality with a sonic sweep across every section of a listener’s brain. She’s quite easily one of the most ferocious guitarists working and it’s about high time she got some accolades to that effect.

The band rides the knife edge between psychedelic euphoria and an acid bath of noise with the noise often blotting out the sun to gain the edge in the tussle. Though, the record isn’t constantly set to singe, the Mountain Movers’ ability to work between back-alley menace, haunted forest anxiety and blast furnace freakout is enviable to say the least. The record is vibrating with enough sinister swamp energy to levitate any listener a good three inches from the floor, which is some feat for a band from the concrete caverns dotting the Northeastern nape of eternal sprawl. When Battalene lays into a riff, which is more often than not, the record explodes into an aural oblivion, both terrifying and ecstatic. These are the moments when the band sparks to an electric life.

The album taps into a classic vein of ‘90s psych – tough outer shell housing a blissful core – and Mountain Movers should dredge up sense memories for fans of Bardo Pond, Major Stars or early Sonic Youth. Like those acts, the Connecticut crew build a towering sound that feels impenetrable until you stop fighting and let the record envelop the brain. At this point, seven albums in, there should be little doubt that the band knows how to wield riff and ravage, but just in case you needed a reminder, Pink Skies topples pretty much all 2018 contenders to prove the point.