4 minute read
Album reviews
Mt. Umbra Not Great
MTUMBRA.BANDCAMP.COM
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You can find the umbra of anything by searching for the innermost, and darkest, part of its shadow. There’s secrets to be found there, but only if you can bring them back out into the light, half-busted and stained as they may be. full of haunting, whirling melodies written to relationships that have deserted her. There’s a highway longing that permeates the lyrics, which start with a question:
Who do you think I’ve become? / Sending a note as you drive / Alone through the desert / To see your mother For no real reason / You used to be a friend.
“Mercy” is held together by fuzzy guitars and ethereal drones, a wandering inland shanty made all the more eerie by Crosby’s cryptic lyrics. The song seems always to be descending, the sonic counterpoint to her all-encompassing apology: “I’m sorry I didn’t see / I’m sorry I
Mt. Umbra is the self-described “one woman show” built by Iowa City-based musician Amanda Crosby. (Crosby also plays with the Iowa City band Younger.) Her newest release, Not Great, is a four-song EP made up of secrets like those and the questions that ride right along with them.
The songs on Not Great operate as cycles, cresting and falling on Crosby’s melodic vocal wanderings. There’s a lot of sonic space on these tracks, audible landscapes crafted out of lightly strummed guitars, stray piano keys and swelling bass lines.
“Days” is a sparse yet churning protopunk meditation, complete with a sincere chorus: “If we make it out alive/I won’t cancel my plans” Crosby sings, pointing toward some unknowable future with a promise. But the off-time-but-right-on vocal stacks remind us that the days just keep coming.
“Joshua Tree” is a postcard didn’t know / You were ready to go / You wanted to go.”
“Phone” captures in small allegory the reality of living virtually for months on end. “I watched my hair go from brown to blonde to gray / What else can I say?” Crosby asks. By the end, her repetition of the line, “I guess I am doing fine” becomes as much a question as a mantra. It’s a pandemic song, straight up, but it begins to question what the words “not great” meant before all of this, and what they will come to mean next.
Mt. Umbra’s Not Great is at once both wandering and concise, a thumb-tacked Polaroid in a Portrait Mode age. Throughout, Crosby’s vocal stacks hold the four searching tracks together. In short, Not Great is pure pandemic pop music: a circuitous cycle formed from a chorus of one’s own voice.
penny peach
Brain Gamez
PENNYPEACHJR.BANDCAMP.COM
2021 is the year of reinvention, and Penny Peach’s Brain Gamez is the perfect soundtrack. Penny Peach is the multi-talented Elly Hofmaier. The singer, writer and recent University of Iowa grad released this carefully crafted five-track EP on March 5 along with an apt message: “just tryna get my mind right.”
This album unfolds like the world’s most dangerous butterfly. The first track is a prologue that expertly guides us into a genre-defying aural trip. Titled “Think More Deeply,” this is what would play at a prom if Fiona Apple was in charge of the music. If Donna Summer had come of age in the post-Reagan era and hired Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead to be her guitarist, this is how she might sound.
“Think More Deeply” is followed by “Self-Help,” which is best absorbed in a smoky basement while enjoying a midshelf scotch from your hip flask. “Self-Help” is garage punk poetry that gives us our first taste of Hofmaier’s fearless vocal style. It’s the perfect lead-in to “Laurelz.”
“Laurelz” is probably my favorite song on the album. Our riot grrrl foremothers would be so proud. Inspired by the darkest of ’60s psychedelia (is doom-psych a genre? It is now), “Laurelz” also features some of Hofmaier’s most experimental vocalizations. Her tone drifts from sarcastic to matter-of-fact, between humor and apprehension.
This feels like a good point to reiterate the care with which this album has been assembled. This is not the sophomore product of an overwhelmed amateur. Even as she plays with style, her performance remains consistently self-assured.
It’s that attitude, imbued in every song, that truly unifies this body of work. Compared to “Laurelz,” the track that follows is a stylistic 1-80. “Leddin It All Go” is a soul-inspired ode to the before times and the reasons we reinvent ourselves in the first place: to put the past behind us and move forward into what is hopefully a bright new future.
The song begins, sweet and melancholic, with Hofmaier easily strumming her guitar. This is before she exercises her full vocal range, building up to a primal yell that—one presumes—signifies the actual act of letting go, so to speak.
(Disclaimer: “Leddin It All Go” contains emergency sirens, which is an audio pet peeve of mine. Are we not in agreement, as a culture and as a species, that emergency sirens in music need to go?)
Hofmaier saves her bestknown song for last. “Bangz” is relatable as hell and the perfect sign-off for the record of this era. This is Penny Peach at her most soulful. She leaves us with “Maybe I’ll go by Eleanor / or maybe I’ll cut my bangz.”
Oh man. Maybe this is my favorite song on the album. She should perform a duet with Lizzo. They’d be perfect together singing about 2 a.m. takeout and losing their house keys. —Melanie Hanson
