Back in 2016, we wrote about Everyone is Here by Monarch Mtn, which we appreciated so much that it ended up on our favourite albums of the year. The recordng project of Colorado’s Logan Farmer, the Monarch Mtn sound is self-described ‘doom n’ gloom’, though as we wrote in our review of Everyone is Here, “It would be wrong to consider the music of Monarch Mtn as simply a two dimensional mope-fest, […] The palette is undoubtedly gloomy, blacks and greys and deep blues, but Farmer’s warm vocals and poetic turns of phrase flicker across this twilight like threads of gold.”
Which brings us to 2018 and I Woke at the Station, a brand new album from Farmer set to be released with our good friends at Fox Food Records. Having the chance to record at the Hill House Artist Residency in Mancelona, Michigan, Farmer headed out into this cabin in the woods with a beard and lots of flannel (referred to self-deprecatingly as “a pitch so overused that it should be cast in bronze and placed on a mantelpiece”), though his intentions were far from recreating the wilderness around him. As Farmer explains:
I knew from the beginning that I wanted to make a city album. An album for driving down the highway in the middle of the night under a sodium vapor glow. A collection full of distinct characters, overflowing with hardship and longing. They wake up, they go to work, they fall apart under the pressure, they dream and dream. The question I really wanted to ask was this: Is there dignity in desperation?
We’re really excited to share the first track from the release, ‘Overtime in the Underworld.’ Making good on Farmer’s urban promise, the track evokes an atmosphere both sombre and subtly savage, as though beneath the calm surface lies a violent force, some predator just waiting for someone to slip up or grow tired. Monarch Mtn gives you the grand tour of this place—a sad, shadowy city where numb people wander and sometimes collide, all haunted by a vague, ubiquitous sense of loss that turns hearts into holes and men into mimes or monsters.
“He leaves the ring, all
cigarette ash and dive bar beauty,
he sleeps beside his Friday bride,
and hopes that she’s eighteen.And oh my god,
he’ll tell you that his life’s a movie,
he fucks and fights, his name’s in lights,
and he can barely read.He should be dead,
or at least dying.
But instead
the world is kind
and inviting
time and time again “
I Woke at the Station is set for release via Fox Food Records on the 7th February, and you can pre-order in now from Bandcamp.