Elliott Brood - Mountain Meadows

Their first release in Australian territories, Elliott Brood’s third album Mountain Meadows has found its way to our shores from their Northern home of Canada. As Max Easton writes, there’s a lot to like about this release from our Commonwealth cousins.

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Following in the footsteps of releases by Two Hours Traffic and Matt Barber, ABC Music has reached across the Pacific to bring us another Canadian talent unrecognized on our shores. In this case, their latest crop is Canadian three-piece Elliott Brood, an alt-country folk three-piece who, with Mountain Meadows, prove to be a diamond in the rough for the recording arm of our national broadcaster.

Taking a banjo, a couple of ukulele’s and overdriven acoustic guitars into the studio, Elliott Brood make no secrets of their love for stringed instruments. Backed with brushed and battered drums and fronted by the high-throated growl of Casey Laforet, their sound is one which isn’t entirely unique, but is certainly unmistakable. They take cues from the blues, country, rock and bluegrass pedigree of their southern neighbours to deliver a broad and tightly wrapped package containing elements of all to create something firmly entrenched in the alt-country Americana sound; a sound of which is as attractive as anything you’ll hear out of the genre this year.

At times, this is a brilliant album. The mingling of dark-country pick-strum guitars with the moans of a piano accordion and delicately plucked banjo on 31 Years makes it a definite highlight of the album alongside the dueling ukuleles on The Valley Town and the rhomping choral sing-a-long Miss You Now. In fact, the album is littered with individual highlights, delivering a record with a set of tracks that you can barely fault in the scope of what the album’s trying to achieve.

Elliott Brood have a great knack of pulling off the gutsier romps of Write It All Down equally as well as the downcast introspections of Notes. It’s always refreshing to hear an album with range, especially when the album flows with unity and cohesiveness instead of dabbling in schizophrenic leaps. However, this cohesiveness is faulted by the occasional track-listing issue; at one point alternating ballads and rockers to the detriment of the album’s flow. One minute the album flows with consideration and interesting segues, the next, it’s clashing against itself and interrupting its own stream of consciousness. Regardless, once you’ve pulled it all together, Mountain Meadows is a great slice of alt-country Canadiana (if such a thing exists), melding banjo charm with parlour pianos, overdriven guitars and rollicking arrangements in a thoroughly satisfying snapshot of crossed genres.

While Mountain Meadows does suffer from the occasional inconsistency and is in no way a perfect album, it’s a more than solid effort which leaves it as a worthy place-sitter amongst the recent international successes of the genre in Calexico, The Avett Brothers and Wilco. Get this album if you ever plan to own a Stetson hat, Blundstone boot or flannelette shirt...don’t if you’d ever roll your eyes at Johnny Cash.