The sprained ankle would be sufficiently annoying on its own, but the annoyance is compounded by the fact that earlier in the same game I got a ball kicked into my left hand, spraining that wrist, which makes operating the crutches required by the sprained ankle next to impossible. Neither of these things would be quite so bad if the ankle injury hadn't occurred at nearly the end of a game played without substitutes, which would have left me limping around for a day or two from sheer exhaustion, even without the injuries. On, of course, the hand the ball got kicked into. All of this means that although I've been home for a few days, with a remarkable amount of foot-elevating time good for practically nothing but listening to music, I've been in a relentlessly bleak, lonely mood. The Steps albums that last week seemed like the miracle cure for melancholy this week are much too plastic and brash to bear.
Swedish pop sounds sickly, four-track bedroom synth noodling far too claustrophobic.
To lever me out of this mood, music has to be willing to meet me halfway, has to be willing to identify with my shut-in ennui before attempting to dispel it. I was largely ambivalent about Helium up until their startling metamorphosis on 1997's The Magic City , and since Mountains is closer to the angular dissonance of earlier albums than the epic mysticism of The Magic City , my default attitude, before hearing a single note, was disappointment. I bought the record out of a feeling of responsibility, and put it on like a chore. Yes, here are the repetitive, minimalist riffs, here's Mary singing in her fitful, sleepy murmur. But I owe Mountains at least two or three tries, and it gets them.