In These Mountains Are Safe, the North Texas trio Shapes Stars Make manages to turn furious progressive rock into an electronic lullaby. The majority of the album’s eight songs are sprawling and wordless, and when guitarist and singer Michael Gooden does open his mouth, he paints images via color and description rather than by being full of conviction or solemnity.
Several months ago, Gooden, bassist Jon Cook, and drummer Zach Edwards signed with San Diego-based Dreamt Music and then went into the studio with The Paper Chase’s John Congleton (Mount Righteous, Modest Mouse, Explosions in the Sky), who had produced the trio’s eponymous 2008 debut EP. These Mountains Are Safe is what happens when a band is focused more on crafting deceivingly complex music than moving copies.
Gooden and Cook both grew up in the Denton area, and each learned several different instruments as part of school and church bands. The destruction of a drum kit left in a treehouse during a thunderstorm forced Gooden to concentrate on other interests such as French horn and guitar. On the first day that Cook, then 16, showed up at Gooden’s house to jam, Cook had never even played the pawn-shop bass and amp that he was hauling.
Through various incarnations (Random 11, Michael Gooden Band), the guys experimented with everything from emo to rap to orchestral music, finally deciding to become the instrumental-heavy Shapes Stars Make in 2008. They didn’t plan on making wordless music, but “it’s where the journey led us,” Gooden said. “Instrumental music can speak to you in ways that words can’t always do justice. A lot of people don’t like instrumental music … but it makes us more creative. When you start writing with lyrics, you get locked into a structure or pattern. You have to water things down.”
The band’s previous drummer –– the eighth in a string of noncommittal stickmen –– left after helping to record the EP. Gooden and Cook placed an ad on Craigslist to which Fort Worth multi-instrumentalist Edwards responded. Edwards, who plays with The Burning Hotels drummer Wyatt Adams in the side project Ice Eater, fit right into SSM’s adventurous, outside-the-box compositions.
With the addition of Edwards, Shapes Stars Make changed from a guitarist’s vehicle into an actual band of songwriters. The first time they played together just a few months ago, the guys wrote “Sunrise,” a song full of crafty time signatures and tempo changes that appears on These Mountains Are Safe. SSM has been flourishing ever since. “We have a natural unity,” Gooden said. While performing, “we can feel when the song jumps, changes, or comes down,” he said.
When composing in the band’s rehearsal room, Gooden intentionally sets up a wandering mysticism in the music. He draws charts complete with arrows and stars, a sort of musical notation indecipherable to anyone but him but that his bandmates try to follow.
Nearly half of the material on These Mountains Are Safe contains vocals of some kind, although in much of that half, Gooden doesn’t convey lyrics as much as he uses his voice as another ambient instrument –– there are also looped guitar parts, wallowing bass lines, and synthesizers. When he does sing recognizable words, Gooden eschews the confessional or pedantic. “I use imagery people can relate to their own story instead of telling my story in black and white,” he said. “I want people to experience the music in a way that means something to them.”
In a live setting, Shapes Stars Make puts on a loud yet subdued show. Bassist Cook uses his feet to play synth parts, Gooden flies up and down the fretboard, and the long-armed Edwards plays with “lots of sweat and angry tears.” Despite the wall of noise and the constant activity, the result is somehow serene.
When Dreamt Records called, Gooden was a tad skeptical of the offer –– the label’s bosses had never seen the band except via a few YouTube videos. But the label is making good on its promises to fund the recording, print the album, and help fund a West Coast tour this summer. l
