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MOVING
MOUNTAINS
Press
Release, March 3, 2011
Press
Release, February 24, 2011
Gregory
Dunn (guitar/vocals)
Mitchell Lee (bass)
Frank Graniero (guitar/vocals)
Nicholas Pizzolato (drums)
There are moments when
the members of Westchester, New York’s Moving Mountains wonder
if they should’ve been born a decade earlier. Their Triple
Crown Records debut, Waves, harkens back to the early 2000s and
finds inspiration from bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, Engine
Down, Cave In, and Further Seems Forever.
“A part of us wishes we were a band that were emerging in
2001...but in a weird way, it motivates us to pick up where some
of those bands left off,” says frontman Gregory Dunn.
Moving Mountains have sought to create something special, and Waves
does an incredible job of proving that. The songs are teeming with
resplendent, ethereal, guitar-driven atmospherics that slowly fade
into your consciousness.
Gregory Dunn co-founded the band as a studio project in 2005 with
drummer Nick Pizzolato. Dunn and Pizzolato wrote and recorded a
self-titled demo EP that was leaked to the public in early 2006
and was followed by 2007’s Pneuma, which Deep Elm
Records re-issued the following year.
“After we put out Pneuma, we formed
a band to perform those songs live, and that’s when we got
guitarist Frank Graniero and bassist Mitchell Lee,” explains
Dunn.
That newly formed band’s first collective effort would be
Foreword, a dense, 36-minute four-song EP that they released
in late 2008 on their own label, Caetera Recordings. By this time,
bands like Thursday, Say Anything, The Dear Hunter and Polar Bear
Club had begun championing the band and inviting them on the road.
“The Say Anything tour was our first big, full U.S. tour,
where we were playing in front of 1,000 people a day. We built up
a ton of momentum and it just worked out. We’ve been so fortunate
because it hasn’t been about trying to sell our band on people
-- it’s been about trying to get in contact with them directly
and then just crossing our fingers,” Dunn says.
The experience of watching crowds react to their basement creations
heavily inspired them when they set out to begin work on Waves
in late 2009.
“Our goal with Waves was to have someone be engaged
from the start to the end,” declares Gregory Dunn.
Engaged they will be. With Waves, Moving Mountains has
produced a powerful collection of majestic, post-hardcore songs
that contain a textured urgency that reaches farther and harder
than any of their previous work. Lyrically, the album speaks of
loss and faith, intertwining topics that Dunn has long dealt with.
“When the band first started, a very close friend of mine
passed away. That was one of the big motivations for all the lyrics
on Pneuma. They’re very figurative and overly metaphorical,
because I was embarrassed to talk about it at that time. With Waves,
I said to myself that it's the last time that I’m going to
write about it, so I’m going to be really blunt, honest and
straightforward about the subject. Pneuma, Foreword and
now Waves have all been about that... a lot of it is also
my struggle with understanding faith and existence... and just about
questioning those ideas--and most importantly--how to overcome that
to appreciate what you have.”
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