Common Prayer - There Is A Mountain

In the English village of Steventon, Brooklyn based songwriter/principal heretic Jason Sebastian Russo (Mercury Rev) and a constituency of British pop talent hauled several half-tuned guitars, myriad scraps of rusty metal and a piano with a knee-high flood watermark into a cow barn on Hill Farm. So was born Common Prayer’s first album, T here Is A Mountain. Now, the band has signed to Big Potato Records, a british label founded in part by Neil Halstead.
T here Is A Mountain’s eleven elaborately cinematic outsider-pop tracks, violin innuendos and organ riffs tangle with scrap metal samples and found sounds. It opens with the beautiful, frazzled skiffle of “commonprayer” then dips straight into the skeletal boogie of “Hopewell”. “Marriage Song” happily weds tin can percussion to strings and country slide above which glides Russo’s yearning vocal. He has one of those voices. The kind that’s at once high lonesome, intimate and rocking. Rarely have our ears heard fragile hooks soar so sweet and sad since Mark Linkous was in his spidery pomp.

Recorded by Danny & The Campions Of The World.

It’s no small thing to make a record both weighty and loose. Funny and sad. At first glance, throwaway - but full of beautifully wrought arrangements. We think it’s the sound of a band taking off.

TRACKLISTING:

(1) Common Prayer (2) Hopewell (3) Marriage Song (4) Us vs Them (5) Sara G (6) Of Saints (7) You Aloft (8) American Sex (9) Free Air (10) Moneyspider (11) Everything & More

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