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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 4 Seasons - The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette

Image
This might be my longest  album review ever. But i swear a couple times, so it's worth the read ;) How could i possibly mention Jefferson Airplane, The 4 Seasons, and Frank Zappa in the same context? Zappa said "this is rediculous" and a few years later The 4 Seasons said "you know what, Frank is right. This IS ridiculous." To which Jefferson Airplane said, "Oh. Ok. Got it." The real question is: which one is the most transgressive? Zappa said stop fighting, you look like idiots. Jefferson Airplane said i guess if love and community is a bad thing, then sure we're criminals and we'd be happy to move out into the fields and live peaceful lives without your garbage, let us go already. The 4 Seasons said hold my champagne for a moment. In 1969, The 4 Seasons released the single most ironic, acidic, extravagant, and downright befuddling album ever created, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. Zappa was accused of writing "shitty doo-w
Read more

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

Pat Benatar - Seven The Hard Way

Image
I don't know about you, but i love Pat Benatar. Yes, that's also her debut album with the single most underrated song in the universe (My Clone Sleeps Alone) in the background, but that's just a generic non-self-titled debut album. We're jumping ahead to her 6th album, Seven The Hard Way, because that, ladies and gentle germs, is how you kalaidescope a concept. Not one, not two, not three, but 4 protien-packed layers to this metaphor. You don't really need to know the overly complicated rules of Craps to know that A) it's gambling, B) "the hard way" refers to rolling doubles, so good luck rolling two 3.5s, and C) you're going to lose, one way or another. It's a joke, but more importantly, it's Pat Benatar and the roll out is Sex As A Weapon, so the innuendo is not intended to be subtle. Wait wait wait, that's only 3, Bottle, where's 4? You're right, last but not least, side B opens with Seven Rooms of Gloom, a Holland-Dozier-Hol
Read more