Guillermo CastroThe first thing I hear as I exit my car is laughter—the deep, convulsive, contagious sort that bounces around from person to person before breaking in a heavy crescendo. Like much of this year’s anomalous winter, it’s unseasonably warm outside, and the members of MTN ISL (pronounced ‘Mountain Island’) are gathered on the front porch of drummer Daniel Deckebach’s house, drinking beers and smoking cigarettes. As I approach, I’m welcomed by a few muttered greetings and the faint whiff of weed, although no one appears to be partaking at the moment.
After a few brief handshakes and introductions, the band continues to mill around and sip on their beers, swapping old stories and sharing details, mostly mundane, of recent happenings. Although the atmosphere is friendly, my immediate sentiment is that of an intruder, of someone who’s disrupting the easy camaraderie between fast friends. The inside jokes, the shared inflections, the rhythm of the humor—it’s not mine to know, which is only to be expected. There’s a collective history here after all, and it runs deep.
With musical connections that stretch back nearly 15 years, MTN ISL recently celebrated their fifth year as a band, and while I’m tempted to look back and trace their beginnings, I’m going to start more or less from the middle. It’s been just over three years since the group released their self-titled sophomore LP, and that intervening time has served as a period of both difficulty and growth, dotted with the occasional triumph.
CREDIT: SHAWN ROBERT CUNI
The Thunderbox effect
Like so many local bands past and current, the spring of 2015 proved to be an enormously cataclysmic time for MTN ISL. The shuttering of Thunderbox rehearsal studios left the band without a reliable space to store their gear and hone their songs, forcing them to migrate back and forth between family basements, dingy studios, shady storage spaces, and wherever else they could find room to carve out their gruff and cantankerous noise. For well over a year, the group sought out a more permanent and secure home base, causing most of the work on a new LP to be put on the back burner.
“We bounced around several practice spaces and that really put a dent in our playing,” says Deckebach. “We were playing the same songs and trying to write, but it was just a hassle. We could never get anything done.”
Given their unsettled status, the foursome also decided to take a hiatus from playing shows, which left them with even less motivation to press forward. Indeed, for four longtime friends and bandmates accustomed to working quickly and writing prodigiously, it was an exasperating transition. Still, despite their frustrations, the group continued to meet every week to practice or sometimes just to hang about and chill. For them, playing music had always been far more about a shared process of creation and collaboration than a vehicle for advancement. In fact, if it weren’t for the constant pushing and needling of guitarist and singer Gene Leath, the others might have just as easily packed up and let the band fade.
“It just has to do with where we are in our musical careers,” Deckebach explains. “We’ve all been in bands in the past, and yeah, in Atlanta a lot of people tend to start bands and then they stop. But we’re past that point. You know, Gene has kids and the other three of us have played together for a long while, but we’re not motivated whatsoever. So Gene pushes us and says, ‘Hey, one day a week, let’s practice.’ So it’s all an excuse for us to get together and hang out. The music isn’t an afterthought, but it is a means for us to meet.”
While MTN ISL’s internal friendships and Leath’s dogged insistence provided enough fuel for the group to continue their weekly routine, it’s doubtful such an arrangement would have lasted deep into the future. Even the most laid-back musician carries with them some measure of aspiration, and at some point the group’s restless holding pattern would have broken someone’s spirit. Fortunately, in September of last year, the band finally discovered a stable practice space in Atlanta’s Westview neighborhood that suited their needs (“It has some of the old Thunderbox heart,” says Deckebach). Almost immediately, the group set to work on conjuring new music and fine-tuning existing songs. The result was a period of feverish activity that saw MTN ISL complete the writing for their upcoming record and much more.
“It happened real quick,” says vocalist and guitarist Josh Lyner of the creative process. “At this point we’re doing our best to keep the brakes on it because we have this new album, and we’ve already written a ton more.”
Maybe Sometimes People
Rcorded, mixed, and mastered by CJ Ridings (Big Jesus, Harmacy), Maybe Sometimes People is simultaneously MTN ISL’s most direct and complete record. The group still trades primarily in angular riffs and lurching grooves, but mostly gone is the band’s former penchant for extended passages and meandering asides. The songs aren’t necessarily shorter, but they’ve been stripped down to their raw essentials, a process that has allowed the music more room to breathe. Listen to the opening one-two punch of “Righteous” and “Svelte” and it’s clear the band can still wield hammering guitars as both a creative tool and a blunt instrument of destruction. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to longtime fans, but what really stands out is the simplicity of the structures and how orderly everything is organized.
While some of the band’s new progression can be attributed to happy accidents, much of the credit for the record’s developed framework goes to the amount of thought and time that went into each track. In the past, the group had been content to enter the studio with sketches of songs and flush them out on the fly. With such a long lag in-between albums, however, each member had been able to assemble their parts with more careful deliberation. This was especially true for Leath, who early on in the process had decided to leave the vocals primarily to Lyner and serve a more supporting role on guitar.
“The time and changes did help because the first two songs we wrote were a little chunkier,” says Leath. “They were the same tempo, but I wanted to try a small tonal difference and up my game a bit and get us to a simpler spot from what I was playing. So it took me a while to figure all that out. I don’t necessarily serve the song all the time. So I was purposefully trying to cut back and get grittier, because that’s what I want, and that’s what these songs needed.”
With Leath receding somewhat into the background on the new LP, the spotlight has turned further on Lyner. As a result, his guttural growls and primal screams take greater precedence, coating each track in a heavy film of scuzzy grit. The deeper you delve into the album, the more you begin to detect recurring sounds and certain rhythmic patterns emerging. Words will occasionally spring in and out of focus, but any attempt to decipher the lyrics only leads to confusion. Every grimy grunt and gravelly bark feels familiar, like if you could just sort your way through Lyner’s acerbic delivery, you might find a poem or some critical observation lurking on the other side. But the truth is, much of it is made-up language.
“There are a couple of lines on the first few songs where I had written out some real simple lyrics,” Lyner admits. “The rest are just sounds and half words I’ve developed from practicing them so much… There are some lyrics. But a lot of it are just noises. Just something in rhythm. Vocals are always an afterthought for whatever reason.”
With such a nonchalant and somewhat impractical approach to singing, you might question why MTN ISL would include vocals at all. Lyner himself is quick to admit that many of his favorite bands are instrumental and singing maintains a low priority compared to playing guitar. But there’s something vicious and visceral about the way he approaches the craft on Maybe Sometimes People. It’s far more rhythmic than melodic, almost like another instrument or percussive element to weave around the group’s blunt-force riffs and spidery grooves. Without his vocals and Leath’s often coarse accompaniment, the band would certainly remain technically impressive, but the music would be far more mechanical and less impactful on an emotional level.
“So when I hear instrumental, say like progressive rock or something like that, I just think of people in the studio recording it,” says bassist Ray Fleming. “But when there is somebody above it, just like yelling, it adds a human element that makes it deeper.”
Trust goes deep
Adding to that human depth is the level of trust and openness the members maintain for one another. There’s an intuitiveness to their approach to songwriting that can only stem from thousands of hours of being locked in the same room, learning and coming to appreciate each other’s creative idiosyncrasies. In a scene that’s often defined by new bands flaring up for a few bright moments before fading away, MTN ISL’s relative longevity seems like a small miracle. There have been other projects, of course, especially for Deckebach whose drumming prowess keeps him in constant demand, but there’s a tacit understanding among the members that if anyone were to leave the group it would be the end of MTN ISL.
“I think everyone brings their own style to it,” says Fleming. “So if any one person didn’t want to do it anymore, they’re automatically irreplaceable. That’s just the end of that.”
Leath, however, takes his commitment several steps further. “I’m done after this,” he says without hesitation or regret.
Listening to the band as I have over the course of several years, their steadfastness towards one another makes sense. Beyond the considerable bonds that a decade-plus of friendship and musical collaboration can create, there remains the crucial fact that no one in Atlanta sounds anything like MTN ISL. While it’s possible to trace their music to a ’90s punk and post-hardcore aesthetic, it’s clear that the band isn’t interested in chasing trends or appealing to any particular subset of people involved in the local scene. Although they’ve been at times one of the busiest bands in the trenches, constantly playing shows and working on new music, they’ve never been able to quite settle in and carve out their niche.
“It’s like the same vibe that the Sunglasses had,” Lyner says, referencing his former band, which also included Fleming and Deckebach. “Too weird to play a normal show, too normal to play a straight-up hardcore show. But the people that recognize it, that like it, you kind of have to see the people, know the people. A lot of people when they describe our band they’re like ‘Oh, I can see your friendship when you’re playing.’ I think that’s a part of it.”
Despite its philosophical-sounding title, there are no overarching themes that unite Maybe Sometimes People. The name itself emerged out of an inside joke that turned into a recurring phrase the band used, one with no more depth or meaning than “shit happens.” That’s not to say that MTN ISL don’t concern themselves with ideology, only that achieving specific sounds and attaining good chemistry play a more critical role in shaping the group’s music.
“We don’t really have a theme on it,” Lyner says with a shrug. “It’s just there, and it’s the music for the most part. I mean, the shows that we play, there aren’t people going ape shit, or it’s not a new trendy thing that’s going on. We’re just doing it because this is what we do to not go insane, you know?”
This may seem like the most basic of guiding principles, but then again the band has never pretended to be anything else other than a group of friends playing whatever the hell it is they want to play. If ideology does work itself into it, it’s probably nothing more profound than Leath’s parting declaration.
“I think we like being friends more than we do bandmates,” he says with a chuckle, and everyone just nods.
MTN ISL will celebrate the release of Maybe Sometimes People tomorrow night, Mar. 23, at the EARL alongside Casual Tiger, Harmacy, and Challenger Deep. Doors open at 9 p.m. Admission is $7. 21+ to enter.
More Info
Bandcamp: mtnisl.bandcamp.com
Facebook: @MTNISL
Instagram: @mountain_island
SoundCloud: @mtnisl
Twitter: @MTN_ISL