Mount Moriah
How to Dance
MERGE
7/10
What’s this new breeze blowing over North Carolina group Mount Moriah? The band’s last LP, 2013’s Miracle Temple, was excellent but foreboding. Here, on How to Dance, the trio of singer/guitarist Heather McEntire, guitarist Jenks Miller (also of avant-metal band Horseback), and bassist Casey Toll shake off much of that dread—connecting English folk ballads to syrupy wah-wah guitar swells, Allman Brothers boogie, and swooning pedal steel. The band’s philosophical weight is unaffected by this newfound lightness: in “Higher Mind,” McEntire passes through Macon and Roanoke to the desert, where her maker implores her to “Find the fire, see where the smoke begins, follow flames and let them burn your hands.” These maxims aren’t canceled out by lines like “Baby, do you like to dance? Do you like it slow or sorta fast”; McEntire finds as much redemption in romance as in her in mystic deserts.
