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| Photo courtesy of Liz Lender |
Everyone who loves music has different ways to filter through every song being created in every moment, to find the stuff you know you have a good chance of loving: the friends you trust (or, say, your fellow bloggers), or maybe the friends you don’t trust (if they hate it, it’s probably great). Music bloggers might have specific publicists or agencies they know are great. I have record labels (Bloodshot, Last Chance, Merge) whose every release I believe I have a good shot of loving.
But there’s still music you miss, or even better: music that slips through your filters, songs that you might have missed or bands you might never have heard, and lands on your desk. Somerville, MA’s Mount Peru is that band for me, right now – for some reason, their polite and charming personalized email to me made an impression, and I fell absolutely head over heels for their latest EP, Is This Thing On?. “Old Mountain Home”, the lead single, is nearly five minutes of scorching roots guitars and achingly lonely harmonies, and sounds like the best of Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit’s live days — think the massive solo in the middle of “Never Gonna Change”, but with a lady backing up the lead vo instead of Browan and way, way more delicious guitar fuzz and distortion.
I don’t know anything else about Mount Peru except that I love this song, and this EP, and there’s a really solid chance that I could have missed them entirely. I don’t know what made me open that email, what made me open the Bandcamp link, but I’m damn glad I did.
You can check out the whole EP at Bandcamp, or stream “Old Mountain Home” below.