For the Folkies: The Acorn’s "Glory Hope Mountain"

In the last few years, I’ve grown enamored of a handful of genres – hip-hop, indie-pop, ambient and most recently, thanks to Greg’s brotherly influence, dance music. But I’ll always be a folkie at heart, and so it’s with great joy and pride that I present to you, dear reader, the year’s finest folk album. The Acorn’s Glory Hope Mountain is this year’s Yellow House or Akron/Family, a shot of something fresh and beautiful that burns into your heart like the fires currently incinerating Southern California.

The Ottawa band’s latest is a more straightforward effort than Grizzly Bear’s sepia-toned reverb-folk or A-Fam’s lo-fi, found-sound weirdness, but it’s certainly on par. There are elements of recent Akron/Family here, as on the tribal drumming and quirky percussion of “Crooked Legs,” but perhaps a closer comparison is Jim Guthrie’s Now, More Than Ever, a not-quite-Sufjanesque collection of slick arrangements and soulful performances.

The Acorn – “Hold Your Breath”: mp3
The Acorn – “Antenna”: mp3

(Glory Hope Mountain is out now on Paper Bag Records)

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