Spooky season is upon us, and The Plan have made an album filled with songs suitable to soundtrack a B-horror film. Returning almost a decade after the Rebecca Gillieron-led project’s warmly received first LP, Nervous Energy, the Southend-on-Sea group’s follow-up, Mountain View, replaces the jaunty no wave sensibility of their debut with a more focused post-punk strut. The intentional gaps within The Plan’s earlier arrangements have been filled in and the band – which has also grown from the trio of Gillieron, Leigh Curtis and James Chapman to include Hayley Hatton adding wonderful flashes of keys and Rob Scillitoe providing bass grooves – leaves no blank spaces.
While not exactly demonstrating a great deal of innovation, Mountain View is still a spectacularly enjoyable album to spend time with. It opens with the lively ‘Patterns’, which announces itself with the kind of looped angular guitar motif we might expect from less imaginative acts looking to ride the post-punk wave. The following track, ‘Human Bird’, repeats this mistep, which is a shame given the wonderful tones and textures employed in subsequent tracks and the unwavering strength of Gillieron’s sharp and nimble vocal performances across all eleven tracks. There are moments, the aforementioned one-two that opens the LP along with ‘Other Side’, that tend to date the production quality and therefore aren’t as inviting to revisit.
To avoid dwelling on those minor grievances, ‘Lizard’, with its luminous cascade of surf-rock guitar reverberating against the steady drums and sombre vocal from Gillieron, presents one of the most transfixing moments on the record. Its beguilling temperament, founded in the loose swing in the rhythm section, shares a similar DNA to the alluring atmospherics of Kim Deal’s Nobody Loves You More from last year. This is the sonic realm where The Plan excel – it’s further explored on ‘Lie On The Ground’, another haunting composition courtesy of the bright tumble of electric piano against the steady march of the rhythm section,.
If you engage with Mountain View with the view of it as a companion to a schlocky horror film – far from derogatory, given how much passion and creative ingenuity can be felt in such productions – then these songs ooze with charm. It takes time for the quintet to find their footing and fully settle into the dimly-lit setting that characterises the back-half of the record. When they do find their groove, however, The Plan feel unstoppable.
A seasonally appropriate LP, one of Mountain View’s great strengths is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. A rare joy to behold amongst contemporary post-punk outfits. Coupled with that, of course, is the simple fact that Gillieron is just a brilliantly endearing anchor. While the new album doesn’t produce the same levels of mystique as Nervous Energy, it does show off a different side to their artistry.
