Mountain Babies - The Cottage, The Creek & The Spirit

The Mountain Babies perform on Saturday at Raven Cafe up in Port Huron.

The Cottage, The Creek & The Spirit is streaming now.

It isn't often enough that I write about bands that aren't from Detroit...or Ann Arbor...or Ypsilanti...or Grand Rapids...or Kalamazoo. I mean, those are typically the Big 5. Port Huron's not that far, people... Meet the Mountain Babies, working toward an eventual physical release of their latest album, The Cottage, The Creek & The Spirit via Detroit-based ZZZ Records and Chicago's Flesh And Bone Records.

I doubt there's a better record for your January's, friends. Ghostly/angelic vocals and icicle banjos, distant gales of tenor sax and frostbite brass, twinkling tinny acoustic guitar strums and a measured rustling of rhythmic arrangements evoking warm exhales to the palms for heat-generating friction. It sounds cozy and mystical at the same time, something you'd read Faulkner to while you sit beside a fireplace or perhaps something you'd pack into your MP3 player for the next shoe-shoeing hike over the next horizon of the unknown, with the faint luminescence of a winter's dusk.

The spell cast by this Port Huron quartet is that of the "quiet close," the music that instills a contented calm, pauses all the white noise and hassle of the otherwise-raging-world-about-you and settles in for a resplendent cascade of chimes, tones and soft harmonies. There's something elemental about it all, like the first deep breath after an inclined climb, when the trees come to a clearing and you see a river, pure, untouched, secret almost... There's also something escapist about it; these tunes are elixirs, daydreams, salves and sweet rejuvenation's.

So hold me close. It's dark in here. You hold the quiet close and I find that home is here

Has that book gotten to ya? Are the characters real? Has that book gotten to ya? Keep your mind free and clean. Oh Oh Oh. There's a river I walk to where my head clears just fine

Maybe those lyrics can say it better than I could....^ 





Saturday / Raven Cafe (932 Military St., Port Huron)
7:30 PM

Did I mention that this is possibly my favorite coffee shop on the planet?