Dear Nora - Mountain Rock

Pitchfork 83

At the turn of the millennium, the Pacific Northwest’s embrace of grunge and riot grrrl was quietly being replaced by a soft introspection that arose from the area’s lush and cool environment. Led by bands like the Microphones, Mirah, and Little Wings, this scene recognized the vastness of the world and explored their place within it: “But I’m small, I’m not a planet at all/I’m small, I’m small, we’re all,” sang Phil Elverum on 2001’s The Glow Pt 2. They appeared in each other’s projects, released each other’s music, and generally evolved together as a community.

Katy Davidson became embedded in this world after moving to Portland in 1995 to attend the liberal arts college Lewis & Clark. It was there, in the summer of 1999, that she formed Dear Nora alongside her classmates Marianna Ritchey and Ryan Wise. Crafting speedy jangle-pop that cherished emotional earnestness, the early Dear Nora sound was strikingly similar to the music of their Magic Marker labelmates Tullycraft, All Girl Summer Fun Band, and the Owls. After releasing a debut LP, We’ll Have a Time, in early 2001, Davidson moved to San Francisco where she continued performing and touring under the Dear Nora moniker.

To construct her second album, Mountain Rock, in 2003, Davidson retreated to her birthplace of Arizona. There, her childhood home was a geodesic dome built by her father on the side of a mountain in the Sonoran desert. Returning to Arizona allowed Davidson to unlock an innate intimacy. (Joan Didion once said of her own native California, “I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places,” and the sentiment seems to apply.) Coloring this natural bliss, however, is terror. The songs of Mountain Rock were penned in response to George W. Bush’s election, 9/11, and the early days of the Iraq War. A sensation of impending dread floats through them. Take the first words sung on opener “The Lonesome Border, Pt 1”: “I know it’s gonna be a strange time/Well it can’t possibly be any stranger than the present/’Cause now it is said, there’s a change/And I sensed the change in me.”

Then there is “People, Don’t You Know?,” which feels like a 40-second brief of the 2015 New Yorker article “The Really Big One,” about a mega-quake that will devastate the Northwest. (“And won’t it be weird/When the dust storms appear/And all life is obliterated,” Davidson sings with a shrug). On “Hung Up,” Davidson buckles under existential worry: “That I will never change/That I am not changing.” Perhaps it’s the struggle to see oneself during a period of surreal transition that helps make Mountain Rock feel so pertinent in 2017.

Communing with the desert changed Dear Nora’s sound from sing-song indie pop to windswept, serene mysticism. The reissue is composed of 20 barebones tracks (there are three new additions) that recall the folk sensibilities of the Roches, Judee Sill, and Elverum, but it also contains traces of the Beatles’ dreamy dissonance found in Rubber Soul or Revolver. There’s certainly a psychedelic vibe to Mountain Rock—not in the “turn on, tune in, drop out” sense, but in the willingness to submit oneself to introspection. Davidson’s focus on the spartan acoustic guitar allows her to replicate small moments, like wind whistling across rocks, the movements of a bird. Every pluck feels purposeful—microcosmic echoes of the world slightly shifting its weight. This effect is heightened by the atmospheric, instrumental interludes scattered throughout: “Living Song” is a mesmerizing drone, “West Nile!!” is an extraterrestrial-sounding guitar loop, “The Climb” is a sleepy piano piece. “Departure Song” is a spare improvised track recorded among the steel curvature of a Quonset hut, which gives the song its vast, cavernous reverberations.

Mountain Rock is largely one tranquil note, but what a beautiful note. The rare moments of tonal difference are not disruptive; rather, they fit the varying moods of life. “Give Me Some of Your Love” is a rare upbeat moment on the album—a blast of twee that Davidson claims in the liner notes is meant to be mocking—but it’s difficult not to take everything on this album at face-value when there is so much apparent vulnerability. “Here We Come Around Again” is another lighthearted track, though it is upfront about its emotional omniscience.

“Oxygen & the Mellow Stuff” is Mountain Rock’s peak. The chorus comes together in a huge way; it recalls nature, like a geyser exploding or a sunrise. It draws a direct line to the charmed beltings of indie-pop duo Girlpool, who referenced Davidson’s project on their 2015 album Before the World Was Big (with a titular song, “Dear Nora”). In quieter moments, like on the wispy “You Are a Bear,” Mountain Rock points towards successors like Girlpool and New York’s Frankie Cosmos; they deliver lines so intimate they necessitate a scrunched face and closed eyes. In 2016, heart-on-sleeve punkers Joyce Manor also listed Dear Nora as a guiding light for their album Cody, and while these nods did not necessarily galvanize the reissue, they attest to Dear Nora’s still-growing influence. Mountain Rock earns it, an album devoted to the inner self and the struggle to find one’s place. As a teenage Susan Sontag once wrote of Fritz Busch’s compositions, “If I could always hear them, how resolute and serene I would be.”