Momus in the Mountains
Cinemarilla | 02/23/2001
(5 out of 5 stars)
"It's the year 2000 (still remember back then?), OS X is just about to go beta, and the flower power iMac is just a glint in Steve Job's eye. Our intrepid Celtic explorer encounters a crooked-toothed hick kid in the foothills of Appalachia and challenges him at gold Pokemon. Gameboys linked, they duel amiably by the light of a laser show..Folktronic is finally playing as mp3 files on my Fuji 40i, after months of teaser Flash movies on momus's website, and it's well-worth the wait. The 'fake folk' genre that Nick's carved out is here in abundance, but it's not the whole story: we also get the fake prog-rock of 'Mistaken Memories', the fake Coward stylings of 'The ... Song', and the fake Brechtian epic 'Pygmalism'. Along the way, Momus also finds time for 80's pop and the exquisite baroque Romance of 'Handheld'. Kevin Warwick couldn't even begin to imagine such a delicate love between flesh and silicon.I'll leave it to you to discover the other delights herein, particularly 'Appalachia' (in which Momus puts the 'corn' into Cornelius) the astounding 'Finnegan the Folk Hero', which nattily updates Dylan's 'Quinn The Eskimo' archetype with a tale of an exploited web designer. Where next for Nick? Negro Spirituals about the woes of legacy systems programmers? You need this CD!"
Good
R. Abraham | Syosset, NY USA | 08/01/2002
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Probably the most idiosynchratic cd in my collection, momus has once again carved out a sound so unique that it deserves its own genre. I still fidgit in delight every time I hear that digital banjo on "Mountain Music." Maybe it's just because deep down I've always wanted to hear a blend of science fiction and folk music, but I think this is a pretty damn good cd. Though it's more of a "musical essay" and some may find it guilty of being "too conceptual", I think this cd more than holds up musically, as well. He's not just commenting on the regurgitation of American culture through increasingly fragmentary postmodern mediums, but he's making it sound catchy and giving it witty momus lyrics. If you're new to momus, however, this might not be a great starting place. You might want to check out some of his earlier albums before you delve into his cerebral genre-mixing experiments. I've also heard a few people enounce the album as "too silly" or as being full of "joke songs", but I think, similar to stephen merrit, Momus's primary goal is genuinely evocative, albeit sometimes intitially ridiculous sounding music, even if it comes across as smarmy, ironic decadance at first listen. One should also be warned that the album leans away from the fake-folk motif halfway through the cd as we get a silly song about momus's [privates](that I thought was far too silly at first, but like all of momus's body parts, grew on me)and a few sprawling epics that touch on the subject of Americana through heavily 80's lenses("Robocowboys" reminds me too much of a cartoon show called "galaxy rangers" i watched as a kid)and songs like "heliogobalus" and "pigmalism" that are just sort of bizarre and indulgent. Recap: digital banjos are catchy, momus is sexy, the future is synthetic,and viva la folk."
Track Listings (20) - Disc #1