Folk has found its edge again. Not just through Junior Brother and this hearty offering, but across the UK and Ireland is a noticeable uptick in quality folk offerings. Welcome to My Mountain finds itself in fine company, in this build of community. This is not a traditional route through the green fields and grey skies around us. Stick Richard Dawson in a room with some snakes, a spinning wheel, and begin pushing the walls closer together to instigate some sickening claustrophobia, and you would get a very unhappy musician. But you would also get an ounce of the power and feeling Junior Brother manages to bring to the table with Welcome to My Mountain, another single from the upcoming album, The End. How apt a title. It does feel as though the natural world and all its bountiful glories are coming to a close.
Appreciate it while you have it, then. Not just the world but your health, your ability to experience the peaks and valleys of life. Be it literally through walking or figuratively through reflection, Welcome to My Mountain suggests both are of equal value. We grow like flowers in the sun, like mushrooms in the dark. What Chris Brain and Henry Parker offer with their folk variety, for instance, is a connection to the roots. What Junior Brother offers is not just that connection, but the intensity which comes when we know we may lose it. Pair it with Small Violence, the song Welcome to My Mountain comes packaged with, and the sensory overload is clear. Junior Brother does well to coax a listener in with his charming woodwind and acoustics, the soft suggestion of whimsy which begins to splinter under the stress, the turning strain of a world on fire, is mesmerising.
There is something inherently cult-like about Welcome to My Mountain. Not in the sense of being hard to find or destined for re-evaluation decades on like a pop-rock Bob Dylan record, but because Welcome to My Mountain sounds like the song you would hear while burned alive in a wicker effigy. Junior Brother is a master of tone and mood, that much is clear from his latest release. The End is in safe hands, only time will tell whether those final days on Earth are better experienced because we had the right people guide us there. At present, we have the end but no guidance. Welcome to My Mountain has no problem drawing a listener in, nor does it have any trouble finding the balance between the welcoming folk-like comforts and the world devoid of hope.
A tonal blur, the whiplash of head-on genre collisions heard on Welcome to My Mountain is nothing short of inspired. Junior Brother hopes for a deeper connection with the world, an eerie sense washing over the song with an unpredictability both welcoming and warning us of the future we have on our hands. Outstanding work which does not forget its roots. But to not forget your roots is to accept they are rotting to the core, to understand the problems of the future is to assess the wilting of now. Welcome to My Mountain does exactly that on an instrumentally essential song, a piece which brings together a brilliant collection of folk instruments, used in ways which the modern-day scene has yet to hear out.
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