Even within
Mary Timony's wide-ranging body of work,
Mountains remains strikingly singular. She seems truly on her own on her 2000 solo debut, taking the medieval-inspired imagery of
Helium's swan song The Magic City in a direction that conjures visions of
Timony as a damsel exiled in a castle of sorrow. These songs are filled with enough death, poison, fire, insanity, and demons for any prog or metal epic, but it's their insular mood that makes them so haunting, especially when compared to
Helium's fiery manifestos. As if to underscore the difference between this album and
Timony's previous music,
Mountains begins with "Dungeon Dance," a piano ballad that's as raw in its loneliness and pain as
Helium's music was in its fierce intelligence.
Timony goes on to spin fables and fairy tales like the modern-day Dark Ages of "Poison Moon" and the cryptic riddle "13 Bees," which takes listeners on a flight of fancy with just her voice and piano. Within
Mountains' prog flourishes and punk-indebted starkness is some of
Timony's most eclectic music, ranging from heavy rock to electronic touches as well as acoustic balladry. Traces of her work with
Helium surface on "The Golden Fruit," a tale of women gaining power in secret set to driving medieval synth-rock. A trumpet augments her formidable fretwork on the charging finale "Rider on the Stormy Sea," one of a handful of showcases for her dazzling guitar skills that also includes "The Bell." More often, though,
Timony casts bewitching spells with open-ended melodies and instrumentation like "An-deluzion"'s elastic keyboards and intricate guitars. On "Painted Horses" and the mighty "One Thousand Perfumes," her heavy tremolos sound like the warping of time and space. As woozy as
Mountains' music gets,
Timony's lyrics are often down-to-earth. When she sings "How was I supposed to know that you don't even like me?" on the keyboard reverie "1542" or "Can you see love through a telescope/The end of fear/And the beginning of hope?" on the standout "I Fire Myself," it adds a vital jolt of reality to the album's fantasies. At the time of its release,
Mountains' witchy chamber rock may have seemed too esoteric compared to
Timony's previous work. In retrospect, though, it reaffirms her status as a trailblazer -- just a few years later, artists such as
Joanna Newsom earned wide acclaim for adding fantastical and folky elements to indie music -- and introduces a fascinating era in
Timony's career.
[Matador's 2021 remastered reissue of
Mountains includes bonus tracks that are just as rewarding as the album itself. An alternate version of "Poison Moon" is both rawer and more drifting than the one that ended up on
Mountains, and hints at the more rock-oriented approach
Timony took on her next record, 2002's
The Golden Dove. Similarly, the recordings of "Return to Pirates" and "Killed by the Telephone" -- which ended up on 2005's Ex Hex and 2009's
The Shapes We Make, respectively -- underscore how deliberate
Mountains' delicate sound was and how much this creative period shaped her music for years to come. However, the newly recorded orchestral version of the highlight "Valley of One Thousand Perfumes" might be the most special moment here. As
Timony's voice floats away on clouds of strings, the song's mystique feels more potent than ever.] ~ Heather Phares