Moving Mountains have had a lot of time for self-reflection. It’s been more than a decade since the Westchester, New York-formed quartet last released an album, 2013’s self-titled LP that only further cemented them as a quietly essential cornerstone in the modern emo, post-rock, and atmospheric genres. Now, after years of silence, the band has emerged from hibernation with renewed clarity: more deliberate, more dynamic, more determined to savor every moment.
Pruning Of The Lower Limbs, their first album for Wax Bodega, stands as an effortlessly beautiful reawakening for vocalist/guitarist Gregory Dunn, drummer Nicholas Pizzolato, bassist Mitchell Lee and guitarist/pianist Joshua Kirby, reigniting the most inescapable parts of their musical souls in ways that are equally urgent and introspective. There’s magic in each subtle, slow-burning crescendo, the sound of a band reenergized to be back together.
It all combines to give this new era of Moving Mountains an overwhelming sense of purpose. Consider how they left – not with a great farewell, but a tour schedule that eventually faded to silence in 2017 – and their reunion feels pure and without pretense, not so much preoccupied with the grandiosity of endings or beginnings, the notion that things, like bands or stations in life, are finite, but instead, that they simply can exist as they are, as they were and as they’ll always continue to be. For the four of them, that’s simply enough at this point as they move forward together.
Matthew Scottoline has grafted the best qualities of ’90s bubblegum power pop–the pitch-perfect songwriting, the pop-rock sheen, the borderline saccharine vocal melodies–onto something far more raw and emotionally resonant. Don’t Look Back is striking in its tenderness and candor–approximately half of the lyrics on the record concern the deterioration of an 11-year relationship Scottoline was in, with the other half being a celebration of new love. The first words Scottolin sings, in opening track “Didn’t Have to Try,” is essentially a statement of theme: “And we’re back at the beginning / Never thought I’d see a face like that again / It attacks when we’re not ready / And I won’t play it safe this time.” This is pop music about actual feelings which means it’s automatically better than most pop music. It is challenging and addictive.
There is not a single moment on Don’t Look Back that isn’t completely drenched in melody and emotion. “Parallel Haunting” evokes the tuneful ache of golden age Evan Dando; “Little Brain” sounds like golden age Evan Dando and golden age Noel Gallagher. Don’t Look Back is, in a word, bittersweet, with melodies that feel like a jackhammer on your brain’s pleasure center and lyrics that feel like getting slapped in the heart.