11.) The Wounded Beat - Mombi (Top 20 Albums of 2011)

The Wounded Beat

Mombi

Own Records.

Original SCQ Review.

On the morning I left for Sauble Beach, my friend texted me some choice lyrics from Mombi’s ‘Cascade Cliffs’. By doing so he’d incepted my mind with the song’s aching undertow, which followed me over my hour-long wait at the bus station, another six hours as I traveled to Hamilton, and the time I spent wandering that city’s corridors waiting for my ride. Loud, open-window rock songs and laughter overtook our car trip but when we arrived to the coast, well after dark, ‘Cascade Cliffs’ returned to me.

A melancholic heart the size of The Wounded Beat is difficult to fully shake. It scales over the listener like a slate-grey cloud and cloaks us in thick ambient mists (‘Monsoon’, ‘The Misunderstanding’). Those impenetrable tracks armed in four-by-four beats offer a bittersweet contrast to Mombi’s more acoustic fare, with ‘Glowing Beatdown’ and ‘More Coal For the Miners and More Meals To Be Given Out’ encompassing the record’s vast plain of introspection. What stands on its own as a solid album is deepened greatly by well-known names guiding The Wounded Beat’s sound: Keith Kenniff (Helios) on production duties and Taylor Deupree, who mastered the disc. With such a crack team collaborating here, it’s no wonder even the lesser highlights on Mombi’s debut manage to cling to our memories so resolutely. A beautiful heartbreak of a record.


Mombi - The Wounded Beat

The Wounded Beat - Mombi

The Wounded Beat

Mombi
Own Records.


SCQ Rating: 82%

Rookie bands accept a gift and curse when finagling a well-known name to produce their debut; their record may be better off but the presence of so-and-so behind the soundboards ensures that all discourse will orbit the producer’s chair. And so I sit here, swooning by the lush intimacies of The Wounded Beat and trying to anchor my thoughts on anything but Keith Kenniff (Helios, Goldmund), the man supervising this engrossing song-cycle. (Oh yeah, and Taylor Deupree mastered it. Damn, that's good company.)

Luckily, the eight songs that comprise The Wounded Beat speak confidently on their own merits and wave the tendency to play fly-on-the-studio-wall with Keith Kenniff. Yes, the brainchild of Helios thrives in accentuating the shadowed acoustics of duo Kael Smith and Matt Herron but his role mostly beautifies a stark and chilling songwriter album. With Smith on guitars, Herron on piano and both fully engaged in sampling and programming, The Wounded Beat merges folk’s backbone to transient atmospheres. ‘Cascade Cliffs (Looking Down)’ and ‘Glowing Beatdown’ dwell under barely lit streetlights, whispering soft confessions over drifting ambient clouds, whilst ‘Monsoon’ and ‘The Misunderstanding’ dial in comfortable four-by-four beats which coexist nicely with Mombi’s poignant, lyrical edge.

The Wounded Beat isn’t the sort of record Mombi will be able to recreate or repeat; it rewards patience at such a gentle rate, one thinks a simple change in sequencing might’ve pushed its focus over the brink of homogeny. In its current, fragile form, however, Mombi have woven something stubbornly handsome between the realms of bleakness and saturation. Never too hollowed out and never too dense, The Wounded Beat should provide a summer’s worth of bittersweet lilts for evening walks.


Mombi - The Wounded Beat by Mombisongs