Sometimes a band’s name can say more about the band than anything else. This band is called Mt. Gigantic. Now what does a name like that make you think of? If you’re me it makes you think of a fucking huge ass mountain with giants roaming around, reaching down to snatch and hurl lightning bolts; yeah, that’s how high this mountain is, you have to reach down to grab lightning bolts. That all may sound redonkulous, but so are Mt. Gigantic, so it works out.

Mt. Gigantic are from Bloomington, Indiana, and incase you didn’t realize it I’ll make sure you remember that there aren’t any mountains in Indiana, basically. Instead of moving mounds of Earth and piling them up, Mt. Gigantic moved mounds of melody and soul, and piled them up on analog tape to create a vast landscape of Southern twang, New York noise, and Midwestern goodness. When I first met the band I had never heard them before, so I naively asked the lady cooking some vegan meal on my stove, "So...what do you guys sound like." She looked stumped for a second and then responded, "I dunno, I guess we’re kinda weird."

Yeah, they’re fucking nuts. A friend of a friend booked them to play in my attic in Milwaukee. A group of eleven or twelve people showed up at my front door while all of my other roommates were out, and I found myself saying shit like, "Yeah...so this is the playing space.", and fucking, "You want some soup?", just to fill in the semi-awkward silence between us. They had been touring for all the month of May with Justin Clifford Rhody (who is the founder of the Friends And Relatives record label in Bloomington) and Fiya (some hardcore band that just didn’t seem the fit the bill right), and I figured it would be a nice gesture to make them a nice, home cooked meal. Well, after they started taking their gear up into the attic their noses took hold of them and they arrived in my kitchen. How the fuck was I supposed to know they were all radical, militant vegans?! I had to eat all of that chicken noodle soup by myself while they went over to the co-op for their wussy, "all natural", "oganic" slop.

But it was all worth while, for when they took up their instruments that night a heavenly angel shone her bright light through my florescently lit loft. Dressed as weird space humanoids from outer space (the drummer wore nothing but a homemade pillow/cloud/speedo, while the guitarist, with his ridiculous beard, covered the majority of his face with a feathery mask, and bassist in foot-tall, silver spray paint painted boots), Mt. Gigantic screeched and screamed and oo-ed and aah-ed through the night. Their sometimes abrasive, sometimes utterly fucking beautiful, heart breaking melodies cut through my ears like a knife cutting through the chicken that they refused to eat. Constructing songs with millions of parts, and millions of seconds in lengthitude, they were reminiscent of Godspeed You Black Emperor turning pop, remembering Animal Collective already existed, and then getting into a blender of "weird". It was the most chaotic, structured thing I had ever heard in my attic, but it all came to an end when the cloudy drummer broke his finger on his snare drum after flailing around during their whole set (how he ever stayed on that throne I would never know, and as I later found out, the night before he flung himself right off of it). He insisted on one more song, with middle finger extended without grasp on the drumstick, and then that was that. We offered to take him to a free clinic to nurse his wound, but instead we made him a splint out of chopsticks and tape.

They had no place to stay, and we insisted they make our home theirs for that night. While they slept I snuck upstairs and recorded their snoring, because even in slumber their melodies seeped through their lips. In the morning we went to record stores, and the lakefront, which just recently had 4.6 billion gallons of poop and other waste dumped into it. I feel like I should make an analogy between that previously respectable lake and the fecal matter that was dumped, with my conception of the music scene before Mt. Gigantic entered my ears, but that wouldn’t make sense.

Mt. Gigantic have a 7 track LP out, titled Old Smiler. One of the major benefits that will come from you getting this album, aside from being able to listen to the songs for a week straight, is your ability to say five years down the line, "Yes sir, I heard about Mt. Gigantic five years ago, and when I heard them I just knew that they would be the next big thing in Music Television."

Sources:

http://www.mtgigantic.com

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