MV+EE With the Bummer Road
Issue #30
Green Blues (Ecstatic Peace!)
By Chris Pacifico
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
If you were to drink the water while going on the boat tour through the creepy tunnel in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, chances are you would be hearing and seeing things like MV+EE do. Led by its brainchildren Matt Valentine and Erika Elder, who both look like they’ve never set foot off the commune until now, MV+EE hail from the wilderness of Western Massachusetts and Vermont and have created a masterful array of hazy, swirling guitars and slow-churning reverb. With their slithering vocals and layers and layers of lurking oracular noises, Green Blues will leave the term “freak folk” on the tip of most critics’ tongues but accounts for much more than a basic pigeonhole of the month.
The terrestrial blues of “Canned Happiness” is as earthy as it is druggy while Elder’s haunting vociferation provides the backbone of the deepwater Americana that is “Mine All Troubled Blues.” As the middle of the album comes about, it is apparent that this is what it must’ve sounded like if Lewis Carroll and Syd Barret ran a secret society and threw a shindig in the woods. “Big Deal” is tantamount to that falling sensation one gets in the midst of a dream but is accompanied by fluttering guitars and wispy resonance.
MV+EE have a sonic vision all its own as viewed through a granola kaleidoscope, accompanied by plenty of syrupy melodies and Delta-blues harp infusions. With the laidback semblance of the duo’s environmental surroundings, which they so aptly capture in their sound, maybe New England should consider becoming a breakaway state in America.
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