Wednesday 07/07/10 Mt. Desolation @ The Lexington, London

Anyone unfamiliar with the Mt. Desolation project and turning up to this
intimate little venue to see a bit of low key live music will have twigged on arrival that something significant must be happening. Fifteen minutes after doors, and the territory close to the stage has already been claimed by a group of punters who look ready to defend it with their lives. Keane t-shirts are suspiciously ubiquitous.

Mt. Desolation is the new side project of Tim Rice-Oxley, songwriter and
piano player with giant pop-rockers Keane, and Jesse Quin, purportedly of
Jesse Quin & The Mets but better known now as live and session bassist
with Keane, a band member in all but name. The project stemmed, so Rice-Oxley will tell us this evening, from a drunken conversation in a Dublin bar only a year earlier, and there is now an album completed and due out in October, and a series of live dates, of which tonight is only the second ever.

Those devoted enough to get here early are rewarded for their commitment by a wonderfully pleasant half-hour’s diversion in the form of The Staves, a lo-fi trio of singing sisters with voices like honey and a mastery of vocalharmony. The box of EPs they’d brought to sell is emptied within minutes of their final number.

On to the main event, and Mt. Desolation consist of Rice-Oxley in his usual
place on keys, Quin on guitar, a Stave sister on acoustic guitar and backing vocals, a drummer, bassist and violinist. Rice-Oxley and Quin alternate on lead vocals, though whether this follows the identity of the songwriter is left unrevealed.

The material is by turns big alt. country rock and gentle alt. country folk, with
Rice-Oxley crooning about, among other things, driving through California and up into Carolina, which we can only assume he did when touring with Keane.

Some of the work has a definite original country feel and is thoroughly
enjoyable for it; some of it, particularly where the piano is prominent, you
feel would only need Tom Chaplin to stand up and sing and it wouldn’t
sound out of place on a Keane album. The most promising offerings seem to come when Quin takes over the microphone, with ‘State of Our Affairs’, which the band have already made available as a free download, being an instant belter of a record, and another one of similar ilk coming later in the set.

With the music industry having been dominated for the last year or two by
the nu-folk of the likes of Mumford & Sons, two of whom are in the crowd this evening and hollering enthusiastically, it’s only a matter of time before the nation moves on a step and goes country bonkers for a while. Mt. Desolation are worthy of a position in the vanguard of that movement, and well worth keeping an eye on from here.