A Moody Walk Through Age-old Places and Outdoor Palaces
Full of images and certain signs of nature, Everything Everything does interesting exploration with their newest album, Mountainhead. It’s a deceptive work of art, fooling its listeners through portraying the sublime as an unpromising entity from which no human being is protected. Just as there are soothing vibes on tracks like the opener, “Wild Guess,” and one of its followers, “Buddy, Come Over,” there are fair amounts of melancholy on ones like “R U Happy?” and “Canary.” Some sounds might compel any listener to go out to the surf in order to catch those untameable waves, while others might just compel the other half of those listeners to sit alone in a dark room, warm tears dripping from their eyes. All of it comes together, this honorable encapsulation of the terrors, horrors, beauty, and potential right outside the doors of any building standing on planet Earth.
This isn’t Everything Everything’s first go-around. They’ve been a formidable force in the landscape of alternative music for the past few years, with a discography that could rival other artists as respected and familiar as Tame Impala and the like. The thing is, Everything Everything’s sound is one that can’t directly go up against others that boom through headphones and AirPods all over. No, they’re much more humble and meek, and they show that with all their might through Mountainhead. The album seems to be an examination of these particularly great mountains that may have inspired poets of the past and present. Those mountains certainly become this band’s muse, and so they put wholehearted spins on what by most is seen as something so normal and routine—namely, something out of nature, which is almost always taken for granted and overseen.
With every one of their albums, Everything Everything has done an excellent job of looking both within and without. They seek to depict the depths of all things that require them to look inward and outward. There seems to be this political overtone throughout Mountainhead. On “TV Dog,” the band digs into the bizarre and life-changing stuff shown on screens every single day. They identify all who have to put up with these images as innocent, saying themselves that they’re trying their best to both do something a little different and shake things up in an impactful way. Mountainhead is their seventh record, but here they are, still in the game, still expanding their horizons, and still staking out new territory through their skillful instrumentations and devilish lyricism.
On Mountainhead, Everything Everything makes strong use of pulsating synths, rich guitar licks, and various groovy variations of alt-rock dynamism. Here, the eerie and the joyful meet, resulting in this cool mixture no one knew they needed. The effects are grand, and they might just assist listeners in seeing colorful illustrations behind their eyelids, ones similar to those played out brilliantly in the flick Ratatouille—specifically, that which occurs when two of the main animated rats the film follows try out different combinations of food. That’s just what Everything Everything is doing here, but they’re fiddling with listeners’ capacities to hear, not merely taste.
“Wild Guess,” the aforementioned opener, is the perfect introduction to the album. It’s peachy and beachy—that is to say, it’d be the right track to play over the speakers of a car being driven to the beach on a sunny day. It connects with the tide, and therefore calls to all. Its wicked guitar brings everybody, whether by invite or not, along on this ride of fun. Another track just as upbeat as “Wild Guess” has to be “Cold Reactor.” It’s this vibey reaction to what’s considered good and evil in the world today. Lead singer Jonathan Higgs says, “I believe in life and terror,” he loves someone deeply, apparently, and even seems to be asking Satan himself for some sort of help.
While “Cold Reactor” is definitely on the mellower side, it shifts the focus of Mountainhead. The following three tracks, “Buddy, Come Over,” “R U Happy?,” and “The Mad Stone,” are totally and somewhat tonally, too, different from what precedes them. “Buddy, Come Over,” creepy as its title suggests, contains instrumentation that’s spooky. Higgs talks about a dead Elvis on the toilet, and that unpleasant imagery surely doesn’t put anyone at ease. Nevertheless, the song does possess vivid synths. “R U Happy?” is deep. It’s mostly chill and laid-back, yet there’s more melancholy on it than there is elsewhere. Higgs asks some genuine questions, including the one that’s shared by this track’s title. Whenever the question of whether one is happy is asked, there’s bound to be this off-guard reply. Higgs asks it a few times here, and there’s as much weight to each time he does so as there is when Will Smith’s character, Christopher Gardner, does the same unto his son in The Pursuit of Happiness. Finally, “The Mad Stone” is where Everything Everything indulges in fantasy. Higgs implores all to come along with him to see whatever this mad stone, as he calls it, is. It seems to be this love letter to journeys in books like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and The Hobbit. There’s this incomprehensible rambling present, and it’s haunting.
When viewing everything on Mountainhead as this connected story or narrative, one’s destined to come to realizations completely unique to them. Perhaps that’s just a part of Everything Everything’s intentions with this album: they want all who spend time listening to it to understand and discern things formerly unknown and foreign to them. The job has been done, the deed finished, and now Mountainhead shall stand time’s test, showing all these intimidating concepts and harsh realities.
