Sometimes a song is the purest expression of a moment, sometimes the deepest exploration of a feeling. Pure instinct or profound excavation. And sometimes a song arrives at exactly the right moment, ready to put down roots. Get those roots down fast enough and it will stay with you all winter, stay with you all spring. It might even stay with you forever.
But life has a way of sending troubling weather, hard frosts, eviscerating storms. Good luck to the song that arrives with heavy weather!
Hartlepool’s splendid Mt. Misery have been on my radar for a while. 2024 has been a year blessed with a crazy number of wonderful guitar bands armed with shimmering guitars, unforgettable ways with melody, and great, great songs. Mt. Misery have been unspooling terrific, jangly, harmonious tunes since 2020, but a two year break preceded their summer single ‘Lunch Break’ and September’s follow up, the wonderful ‘Waking Up’.
I heard ‘Waking Up’ just before the floods. It hasn’t been the best of autumns. I noticed how good it was, though. How perfectly weighted – a piece loaded with harmonious musicality, a lovely blend of sun-kissed and melancholy impulses. The sun was out when it landed and joy reflected from every shimmering surface – two and a half minutes of perfect pop which recalled the breeziness of West Coast jangle, the analog warmth of Stereolab and the Antipodean instinct for balancing light and shade best personified by The Go-Betweens. It’s deeply lovely.
Then I looked away for a moment and realised that life was steering me into choppy waters. I popped the song on repeat, and began juggling the shifting cargo of adult life—phone calls to care homes, parental admin, hospital visits. Across the world, water levels rose in North Carolina, Florida and Valencia (and in Cambridgeshire the Ouse burst its banks and my parents were separately hospitalised). Ships get tossed in storms and the freight skitters across the deck. But ‘Waking Up’ kept spinning, and with each breezy fanfare of its glorious keyboard riff, it sounded better and better. It might be my song of the year.
The songs manifold charms are apparent from the very first bar; a woozy, fairground organ swirls before an uplifting, mid-tempo cycle of major, sun-drenched chords, emphatically coasting beneath a bed of harmonies in which the band are joined by Cece Fallow, whose vocals are a highlight.
We are “Waking up super early”, the lyrics explain “to watch the morning creep on through the curtains”. It’s an uplifting opening, but what follows is more complicated – a quiet rumination from a person at the point directly preceding action – resolving to “animate the dawn-lit road”, to start the engine and go. To listen attentively, to participate and speak, not “bite down on my tongue when the moment strikes”.
Yet I think the narrator is all too familiar with hesitation and procrastination.
“When it gets complicated, I wish we’d never have waited,” is the song’s revelatory refrain; a feeling we all know well. How easy it is to put off ‘til tomorrow what could be done today. But there’s still time, and the bittersweet longing of the lyric is ameliorated – buoyed up – by the stunningly sunny, luminously bright, jangly exterior.
It’s totally lovely and conceptually delightful, resolving with the confession that “all this time I’m waiting to catch you / with love in mind”.
Songs can be temporary things. They pass through our lives; fleeting moments of clarity, scattering memorable fragments of melody or a few lovely lines before the noise of the world washes them away; bugs off a windscreen. But every so often, a song lodges itself in your mind and refuses to shift. It lingers, matures, and deepens, becoming part of the fabric of your days.
‘Waking Up’ by Mt. Misery is one of those songs. It felt breezy and familiar from the off, like a tune I already knew. But I’m no longer able to unglue it from my brain, nor imagine it sounding any other way.. It just exists. A song that is both inevitable and unforgettable. Waking Up feels like a gift.
Mt. Misery have crafted something rare here: a two minute pop song that is pure as air. A perfect distraction from an imperfect world.
Written by Jonathan Shipley
