This seventh solo album by the Super Furry Animals frontman set out as conceptual biography of East Asian active mountain volcano Mount Paektu, but this piano-led set of songs with a 70s psych-pop grandeur also has personal elements, and is produced by Beastie Boys producer Mario C. The inhuman timescale of a peak’s existence and the intimate features that bring it to mythological life give the songs and the mountain a more human element, as Gruff says:
“The album is about people and the civilisations, and the spaces people inhabit over periods of time. How people come and go but the geology sticks around and changes more slowly. I think it’s about memory and time/ It’s still a biography of a mountain, but now it’s a Mount Paektu of the mind. You won’t learn much about the real mountain from listening to this record but you will feel something, hopefully.”
Standout tracks include Mausoleum of My Former Self, Hiking In Lightning, Can’t Carry On, the catchy Loan Your Loneliness, Seeking New Gods, Holiest of the Holy Men and Everlasting Joy. There’s a time-spanning melancholy here, but also many transcendent highs – out on Rough Trade.
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