Mountain Heart – Force Of Nature

No bluegrass band has come on stronger in the last few years than Mountain Heart, which won the IBMA’s Emerging Artist of the Year title a couple of years ago before their first album had hit the streets. Their Skaggs Family debut, No Other Way, increased their visibility, and now the group returns with a carefully selected new batch of songs and a new guitarist, bumping the lineup to a sizable six pieces.

Clay Jones, the new addition, has been known to cognoscenti since the early ’90s as a muscular rhythm guitarist and fleet-fingered, imaginative lead player. His return from a premature retirement brings an additional measure of excitement to what is, thanks to mandolin giant Adam Steffey and young fiddler Jim Van Cleve, already one of the hottest instrumental lineups in bluegrass.

With three strong lead singers, Mountain Heart has a lot of room to move stylistically, and they make good use of the flexibility on Force Of Nature. Still, the predominant flavor on the album is a distinctive blend that filters modal mountain melodies through accomplished lead and harmony singing. The result has the mournful cast of the archetypal Stanley sound but the thrilling precision of Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, for whom half of the group once worked, and whose sound they recall on the closing “I Want To Live Beyond The Grave”.

Highlights include “Snapshots And Souvenirs”, a meditation on the passage of time, and the rip-snorting “Born On The Wind” — both co-written by band members — as well as Darrell Scott and Anthony Wayne Scott’s lament for a fallen soldier son, “With A Memory Like Mine”.