Stream: Mines Falls, ‘Hey Mother’ and ‘From Behind Glass’

Kevin Bronson on September 16th, 2020

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The music of Mines Falls moves deliberately but leaves in its wake a multi-hued trail of melancholy, enmity and, ultimately, marvel.

The New Hampshire-bred brother duo of Carson and Erik Lund return this week with “Mines Falls” their second album and the follow-up to 2018’s “Nepenthe.” Like their debut, it’s cinematic downtempo chamber-pop, pulsing with an electronic heartbeat — glitched out for this moment in time yet adorned with horns, woodwinds and strings. Radiohead is the most obvious touchstone, but “Mines Falls” might also appeal to fans of Majical Cloudz, James Blake and the Antlers.

The layered instrumentation and arrangements give the album a certain sprawl, a panorama upon which the Lunds draw a landscape fraught with emotional and societal turmoil. Their sound coalesces on singles such as “Red Moon, Car Wreck,” “Hey Mother” and, especially, “From Behind Glass,” a song that Carson Lund says “paints a portrait of a deteriorating relationship that’s a few parts autobiographical and several parts fiction.

“In some ways this song epitomizes the sound we were gravitating towards with this album: angular, unsettling, and neither organic nor fully electronic,” he explains. “A wonderful musician from Chicago, Matchess, who also performed in a feature film I shot in the summer of 2019, plays the beautiful strings, which provide a counterpoint to Erik’s sharper analog synth sounds.”

The album was self-produced (Eric Dabdoub did the mixing, Brian Arnold the mastering) and recorded in the brothers’ home studio — though not the same room in which they made “Nepenthe.” As they foreshadowed on their debut album, the Lunds’ Craftsman house in Hollywood was torn down by developers, so the duo ensconced to another Craftsman about 10 minutes away.

“Mines Falls” is officially out on Friday.

||| Stream: “From Behind Glass,” “Hey Mother” and “Red Moon, Car Wreck”