Glory Hope Mountain

Though Canadian bands have seemingly been excelling at just about every form of pop music since the turn of the millennium, it's the album-length epic where they've really been outstanding. Broken Social Scene's You Forgot It in People, the Arcade Fire's Funeral, and Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary have been three of the biggest, and the Acorn's Glory Hope Mountain deserves to take its place beside them. The Ottawa band's first full-length album after a series of EPs that have attracted increasing attention, Glory Hope Mountain is a good old-fashioned concept album, but an unusually personal one: Glory Hope Mountain is a rough English translation of the name of singer/songwriter Rolf Klausener's mother, Gloria Esperanza Montoya, and the album is an impressionistic rendering of her life, starting as a destitute orphan in her native Honduras. The impressive thing is that the average listener would never guess that from an initial listen or two: thankfully, there is no ham-handed narrative structure to the album's lyrics. That said, the incorporation of traditional Honduran folk forms into the arrangements of songs like "Flood" and "Low Gravity" feels completely organic in exactly the way that the Afro-pop affectations of Vampire Weekend's debut album do not, like a natural outgrowth of the songs and their meaning, not a "hey, this'll sound cool" add-on. The 12 songs flow beautifully, culminating in the simply gorgeous "Lullaby (Mountain)," a delicate acoustic farewell with Ohbijou's Casey Mecija's gentle vocals replacing Klausener's own. It's a perfect closer to an ambitious album that fulfills the musical and lyrical goals it sets for itself.