Mountain Climbing!


Ladies and gentlemen, squirrels and squirrelettes, have you ever heard the song Mississippi Queen and wondered if the album it came from is any good? I have, i've wondered that multiple times.

Great news! It is. We'll get to that in a minute, first we have to address the critic schlock. This album was produced by Felix Pappalardi, so the go-to snarkicism was some form of joke involving non-dairy caffienated beverage lightener, but Mountain is widely regarded as one of the key influences on Heavy Metal as any form of coherent genre. More than that, their debut album has both an exclamation point and creates a pun when you say it after their name. Here's Mountain Climbing! See how much fun that was?

Whaddawe get? Fuzz. Heavy bass fuzz, heavy synthy guitar doodles even Robin Trower would drool over, and some of the best early 70s Hard and Acoustic Rock songs ever written. Now, with a name like Mountain Climbing!, it's obviously going to be a "here's all the squirrelly things we're capable of playing" type album, but i can almost guarantee if we did a drop the needle test on any of the other 8 songs on this album, at least one person would say "kinda sounds like that band that did Mississippi Queen," and i don't think you can really ask for much more than that. 

I guess if you're a real cowbell aficionado you'll be disappointed by its complete disappearance after the lead-off smash hit, but otherwise i think you'll agree randomly stumbling across a VG+ copy for only a couple dollars is quite the windfall.

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