Complete Mountain Almanac

Album review

The new album by Complete Mountain Almanac had a circuitous route to existence. It's a project featuring The National's Bryce and Aaron Dessner with their sister Jessica—a poet and visual artist who has painted album covers for her brothers' band (Trouble Will Find Me) as well as Sufjan Stevens and others—plus Norway's Rebekka Karijord contributing vocals. It began when Karijord asked her friend Jessica to contribute "poetic and lyrical" elements for an album focused on climate changes, with 12 suites to represent a year. Not long after, Jessica was diagnosed with breast cancer; she had recently moved from America to Italy with her family and has written about the trauma of facing the diagnosis in a country she barely knew. She began writing poetry about it, which dovetailed with the environmental themes Karijord was seeking—how the beautiful and organic is deceptively fragile; how the body can betray through no fault of its own. Co-producers Aaron and Bryce both perform on the album, and Bryce wrote string arrangements played by Sweden's Malmö Symphony Orchestra. The result is not just atmospheric, but elemental, playing off traditional folk as well as chamber and baroque styles. "February" addresses a fear and reckoning of the future. "Near the hunter's forest/ Someone will take apart my body/ In order to save me/ Three small bottles," Karijord sings. "March" is delicate, with parts of the song almost sounding underwater or as if they're being heard from some other realm, through a veil, but Karijord's crystal-clear voice and Jessica's maternal words address the subject matter clearly. "Thank you beautiful breasts for all the life I've found through you/ gave through you … I love you/ You are loved." The compositions set a scene for the instruments to play like actors, as when the guitar is an undercurrent carrying Karijord aloft on "May" as she sings an appreciation for support ("Her hands open/ Her mouth open/ Her body open"). Or on "June," with plaintive strings and piano playing out the heavy emotions of words "The clouds go away/ But the moon has to stay in the dark." "September" is mournful, spiritual and beautiful, with a glacial chorus vocalizing hymn-like "ohs" until the voices sound like yet another instrument. "August" is the most National-like, with its gently strummed guitar. It's almost playful sounding—horns softly blowing in with the lyrics "the wind on my body"—even as Karijord laments the crumbling destruction of Earth, hitting some stratospheric notes. And "December"—as dramatic as Spanish flamenco—ends with a sort of reckoning and resolve: "The body betrays itself/ The body it heals itself." © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz