Mountain Con!

Not many bands can be described in terms of a natural disaster. But then again, Mountain Con is not like most bands. Mountain Con is like a perfect storm of contemporary music, with all the best elements of the last 50 years coming together in their sound at just the right time, and in just the right way to create enough force to completely blow you away.Not surprisingly, the bands’ record collection is pretty extensive. You can hear that when you listen to the musical references bubbling through their songs – both overtly and on the sly. Of course, any band can be derivative. What makes Mountain Con’s brew so intoxicating is the way they manage to make the old music sound so modern. “Most of us share a love of folk, country, 60's rock and old school R & B,” says lead singer James Nugent. “This really informs many of our choices as producers. [But] we are always paying attention to the latest hip-hop records. Hip-hop is where innovation is still accepted and rewarded.”Oddly enough, the members of Mountain Con say that it probably helps that everyone in the band comes from small towns in the Rocky Mountains. Although Nugent jokes, “You’d think we would sound more like John Denver,” he claims that growing up in cultural seclusion prevented them from seeing the more finite differences in musical genres – and thus kept them from developing any of the faddish allegiances that city kids often have. While the New York craigslist site is full of bands claiming to be practitioners of one hyper-specific genre or another, Mountain Con isn’t rooted in any particular school of thought at all. “We are outsiders,” James says, “so we feel we can do as we please.”The music that comes out of this unfettered mindset is hard to describe. The band plays conventional rock instruments, along with some banjo and acoustic guitar to give things a bit of a folksy backwoods feel. As with many of today’s indie rock bands there are stylish drum loops laid into the percussion tracks for added thump. Things start to go off track however, when you get to the DJ. Pledge is the most recent addition to the group, having joined back in 2001 when their first DJ left to join The Turn-Ons. As you might expect, DJ Pledge is largely responsible for the hip-hop influence on Mountain Con’s sound. His most dazzling trick is that he plays all the guitar solos on the band’s most recent record – by sampling the appropriate sounds and then manipulating them through the hip-hop DJ’s traditional arsenal of cuts and scratches.The hip-hop influence can also be in heard in how sample rich the rest of the record is. Sancho Panza was recorded in the band’s own studio, which they built themselves in a vacant warehouse on the Seattle waterfront. All of a sudden they had all the space they wanted, not to mention all the time they needed to experiment with different sounds and mixing techniques to get the feel they were looking for.With time to play and uninhibited creativity, Mountain Con has created an entirely unique brand of pop infused new millennium funk – that somehow still feels like rock music. The music is the result of long, obsessive recording sessions, the kind of thing that only a dedicated group of music nerds could pull off. “We would record hours of stuff,” says Nugent, “and then pick through them like a film editor would – finding the perfect moments to sample. About half the record is built on samples, the other half is live-tracked instruments. It is hard to tell where the samples end and the live instruments begin. That is what we were hoping to achieve - a kind of synthesis between technology and tradition.”Lyrically, the album matches the modern timeless aesthetic of the music. The songs on Sancho Panza contain a sense of celebratory optimism despite an acute awareness of impending doom. It’s definitely the kind of thing you could play at a festive gathering, but you can’t deny that in addition to being social music, it’s also socially aware. “As much as we try to make records that will be the life of the party, we can't ignore what's really going on in the night right outside the door,” Nugent says. “Are we party music or are we really depressing social commentary music? The two go together - like a suicidal circus clown. He makes the kids laugh, but at night he is drunk watching MASH and cleaning his pistol by the light of the TV.”Mountain Con’s potent blend of social awareness, innovation and song craft has not gone unnoticed by the powers that be. Their album Dusty Zeros/Dirty Ones was recorded in 2003 and picked up by one of the larger major labels. After being held in limbo for a year, the masters were returned to band and the label abandoned them. The experience soured them on the mainstream, and they’ve since made several choices that have actively kept them underground. Nugent says that this is really the only way a band like theirs can operate. “You don't want to hear the version of Mountain Con they wanted to make. It really sucked.”Although it probably cost them a lot of money, Mountain Con refused to be homogenized. Their sacrifice is your reward. Be it through stubbornness or band initiative, Mountain Con has developed a sound that is unlike anything you’ll hear on conventional radio. It is unique and exciting, and if there is any justice in this world, it won’t remain underground for much longer.“I'd rather not be a musician at all than make that certain, highly calculated music that is produced by the big labels these days,” Nugent says. “This probably keeps us broke and obscure, but at least we are still making music for ourselves and not something shelved at some major label collecting dust. Besides, this is a new era for the music business. No one knows how it's going to look when all the chips finally come down.”