L.A. Duo Mines Falls shares a "gorgeously hypnotic" single & video "Hey Mother" & announce Self-Titled LP For Sept 18.
Mines Falls is an L.A. duo of brothers who work in film and design by day and make luxurious, moody pop music by night.
It didn’t take a pandemic reaching American shores for brothers Carson and Erik Lund of Mines Falls to hone the art of self-reliance. Written and tracked through the fall and winter of 2018, their self-titled sophomore album, like Nepenthe (2018) before it, emerges from extensive and experimental sessions—carved out between long work days and film shoots—in the home studio they’ve developed together over the better part of a decade. Skirting the sonic expectations of a history of music forged in garages and bedrooms, however, Mines Falls instead summons up a dense and layered soundscape, equal parts warm chamber pop and eerie downtempo, with Carson Lund’s commanding voice a constant presence throughout.
“Hey Mother” is the earliest song I wrote for the record, and therefore the one that’s most tied to the emotions that swirled around our previous album, Nepenthe.
With that collection of songs, I was trying to write very honestly from a place of emotional turmoil, but this song is about landing in a state of acceptance after all of that.
The “mother” here is less a reference to my own mother than to a stubborn omniscient spirit to whom I’m trying to communicate some kind of self-reckoning. You might say she’s my conscience as I try to will myself to concede the end of a relationship.
Says Carson Lund.
Beyond their recording capabilities, the Lund brothers also shoot, edit, and design nearly all of Mines Falls’ supplemental artwork and video content, finding shrewd use for the disciplines they studied in neighboring Boston art schools and only sharpened in the intervening years.
“Carson went off to make films and I polished my skills as a designer, but music has always been that shared passion,”
says Erik, who played drums in the brothers’ former band, Boston indie rock quartet Old Abram Brown. When differing life trajectories ultimately dissolved that group, the brothers shipped off to the west coast to explore new creative opportunities, finding inspiration in the Sierra mountain range and Mojave Desert—landscapes that, to New England boys, looked practically alien. After inheriting an upright piano from a neighbour, they wrote Nepenthe, a haunting suite of glacial ballads described by Earmilk as "beautiful, calming, cinematic and moving,” and an album that the band describes as “rooted in a very particular time and place.”
As prophesied in Nepenthe single “My New House,” the Lund’s Craftsman-style home in Hollywood was torn down by real estate developers months after the album’s release. Composed in a new Craftsman-style home ten minutes down the road, Mines Falls marks both a stylistic evolution and an ambitious leap in scope even as it retains piano as the heart and soul of the music. Continuing producer and multi-instrumentalist Erik Lund’s ongoing experimentation with electronic programming, the band’s second LP finds the looming atmosphere of anxious ambient noise and classical instrumentation established by Nepenthe now coupled with propulsive drum-machine backbeats and a flair for dramatic choruses. And where the intimate and confessional Nepenthe catalogued songwriter Carson Lund’s confrontation with a friend’s sudden passing and the end of a relationship, Mines Falls shifts toward a more panoramic perspective, tackling the ambiguity and despair of our contemporary moment through a succession of elliptical tales that toggle between political anger and wistful remembrance.
“As I was writing, a heroin epidemic was swallowing up communities in my home state while forest fires ravaged my new state,”
recalls Carson, referring to the band’s New Hampshire origins and current Los Angeles residence. And fittingly, Mines Falls is bookended by songs that comment obliquely on these calamities, with “Passenger Door” imagining the scattered recollections of a man in the wake of his friend’s death by overdose and “Lifeboat” seeking refuge in a winter memory amidst the auburn smoke clouds of Southern California. Within these seemingly bleak poles, however, Lund’s elegiac lyrics touch on the pleasures of childhood memories (“Red Moon, Car Wreck”), the solace to be found in the fraying of a relationship (“Hey Mother”), and the enduring tonic of laughter (“Cowards”). In fact, Mines Falls is nothing if not a testament to the mind’s ability to resolve its own gloomy projections; as the anthemic “Nightingale” puts it: “fairy tale // comfort me // when all this shit comes suddenly.”
Mines Falls LP will be out on Sept 18.
Mines Falls - Mines Falls