Mountain Caller: “Sometimes the story leads the music, sometimes the music writes the story”

Mountain Caller want to tell you a story.

So far in their great tale, as laid out on their debut album, Chronicle I: The Truthseeker, a protagonist has awakened in a ruined city with no knowledge of her own name, what’s going on, or much else. Setting out on a blind journey to work out what’s happened, eventually she learns of her powers, and in a cave on the side of a mountain, begins to remember things.

Here’s where the new, second chapter, Chronicle II: Hypergenesis, picks up.

“She travels across the land by day and night, and comes over the crest of this hill where she sees this island floating in the air as though it's been ripped out of the ground by giant hands. It's suspended there, anchored to the ground with huge chains,” tells bassist El Reeve. “It has these waterfalls that run backwards to it, and she can see some kind of building on the top of it. So she climbs and discovers that it's an ancient library and archive in the building, which defies the laws of maths and physics, everything about the shape is all wrong.

“It's in ruins where she goes inside, but all of the books and scrolls and documents are in immaculate condition," she continues. "She soon realises that that's because of this being, The Archivist, the second track on the record, who by degrees helps her to find what she's looking for. They communicate with their minds, and she manages to convey in a flurry that she wants to learn from the mistakes and failures in the past of this lost civilisation, to not repeat those mistakes in her project of reimagining and remaking the world. So The Archivist brings her all of these books, written in a dead language that she has to decipher. And in one of those texts, somewhat guided by The Mountain Caller, she finds the next clue that continues the narrative.”

Told you they had a story. Proggy? Yeah. In fact, Mountain Caller’s label manager refers to them as “power-prog”, which actually works very well. It’d be progness as normal having such a sprawling concept. Except…

“It’s all instrumental!” grins El.

“That's the fun of it,” adds guitarist Claire Simson. “Sometimes the story will lead the music, sometimes the music will write the story. It’s part of the joy of writing music with this band.”

Oddly, if you’re following the story as you listen, it starts to become clear in the mind. The riffs the band – El, Claire and drummer Max Maxwell – carefully craft into shape paint a vivid, lush picture of this world and its central character. But even without knowing what lies beneath, Mountain Caller are impressive. As befits such an outfit, the riffs come in many shapes and sizes, taking in flashes of Tool, stoner rock, Soundgarden, doom and anything else you can get from a guitar. They’re also just as neat a tourmate with Svalbard or Urne as they are appearing at London’s Masters Of The Riff doom fest.

“One of the many things that I love about being in this band is that we’ve never tried to push ourselves towards sounding like a particular thing,” says El. “The bar is just: ‘Do we think it’s good?’ We just like wandering around wherever our imaginations take us. That sounds really knobby, but it's true!”

“Our motto has always been: ‘Nothing is too anything,’” says Max. “If we bring an idea and say, ‘Is this too grungy?’ or too metal, or too proggy, we'll try it and see. It goes through the Mountain Caller filter. And it normally works, it normally just ends up sounding like us. And we don't want to be a band that just hammers the same riff over and over. If you’ve got no lyrics, you’ve got to keep the interest up.”

During recording, this was given an extra boost by producer Joe Clayton (Ithaca, Wallowing, Underdark) being on the band’s wavelength. Or, ahem, on the same page…

“If we ask for something, he knows how to make it happen, no matter how esoterically we describe it,” says Max. “We’ll say, ‘Can you make this bit sound like Steve Albini?’ and he'll go, ‘Yeah, okay.’”

“Some of our descriptions really are weird, though,” laughs Claire. “We’ll be like, ‘Can you make it sound like December? No, that's November!’”

“I was thinking about Superunknown by Soundgarden a lot,” says Max. “I was like, ‘Joe, can you make it sound like one of the most expensive albums ever made? Thanks, mate!’”

The result is a record that amply sets the scene for its conceptual goings on. Now that chapter II is about to come out, we have to ask: what happens next?

“Oh, we can't possibly tell you that,” teases El. “But it’s going to be even more epic.”

Listening to Hypergenisis, that’s a hell of a mountain to climb. Come now, hear their call. And their riffs.

Mountain Caller's album Chronicle II: Hypergenesis is released on January 26 via Church Road

Read this next:

• The 13 essential progressive metal albums you need to know
  
• Green Lung: “None of this stuff feels like we’re gunning for it – it just happens because we f*cking love it”
• 12 of the most out-there concept albums ever