Look, it's the holidays and things are hectic. I know there are a thousand different things screaming for your attention and your money. I know there are a million lists that will tell you what you missed this year and what you should be paying attention to next year. And I know you'll likely ignore all of that advice and buy enough liquor to black yourself out until Presidents' Day. But before you do that, before you're inundated with the 9 Billion Songs You Need to Hear Before New Year's, let me offer one bit of advice: Get yourself a copy of T. Hardy Morris' Hardy & the Hard Knocks: Drownin' on a Mountaintop and fuck the rest of that noise.
Released all the way back in June — which, let's be honest, feels like eight or nine lifetimes ago — Mountaintop is the sophomore solo album from the Peach State rocker, best known for his work with Dead Confederate and indie supergroup Diamond Rugs, and a definite contender for top-shelf inclusion in the contemporary Southern rock canon. With Morris' Georgia drawl and fuzzy riffs, Mountaintop's languid hooks wind through your brain like a mystical country road connecting Athens to Seattle. These are grade-A prime cuts of slacker mediation and self-reflection couched in pedal steel and grungy guitars, traversing the mountains and valleys between you and adulthood and floating somewhere between heaven and earth.
"I love the songs, I don't even think they're songs that I could write now," Morris tells the Scene. "It was [written] in the run-up to having a kid. I was just trying to expel all that youth, trying to spit all of that stuff out and kind of hone in on being younger and just kicking out the jams. ... [It's] more just irreverent and abandoned than sentimental. [Debut album] Audition Tapes was more the sentimental version of youth, and this one is more the 'Who gives a shit' version of youth, know what I saying? Actually being there instead of looking at a picture, watching a home video instead of looking at a picture."
A huge part of Mountaintop's charm is its liminal nature — the way it can be snotty and sweet in the same song, the way it lovingly flips the bird at life. When Morris first told this writer about the album back at a Diamond Rugs tour stop, he described it as "booger-eatin' music." Listening to tracks like the sardonic-yet-sorta-sappy "Shit in the Wind," or the snarling shuffle of "Painted On Attitude," it's hard to shake the image. This is an album that isn't about to conform to social mores and musical forms — it stands apart from both the Americana and indie-rock communities that have embraced it — and doesn't give a fuck how you feel about that. Except that Mountaintop knows exactly how you feel.
It's not an album that runs entirely on attitude, though. Peel back the layers and you'll find rich, emotionally complex lyrics. On "Likes of Me" — which sounds like it could have been pried from Kurt Cobain's cold, dead hands — and the slippery, prickly "Littleworth," Morris creates conflicted characters that grow more endearing with each spin. Recorded in Morris' hometown of Athens, Ga., and produced by Nashville's own Adam Landry and Justin Collins — whose own band Justin and the Cosmic joins Morris and Diamond Rugs/Black Lips alum Ian Saint Pé on Sunday's Basement East bill — Mountaintop sounds rich and warm, entirely Southern but uniquely its own.
"[Recording] it was a lot of fun," says Morris. "It was more fun for me than it was for Adam [laughs]. He enjoyed the process, but he got a little frustrated, he's got his place so dialed in. But I think we were able to capture some things there that we wouldn't have been able to do at his place."
The end result is a perfect complement to Morris' catalog that stands on its own as a musical statement reflecting on times both good and bad, an album filled with the sort of songs that should be topping lists in this or any other year.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
