SINGLE: Biffy Clyro - Mountains

What’s that… Iffy Lilo? Miffy Biro? … Wiffy Milo?
It’s Biffy Clyro, and the only thing stranger about this band’s name is their music. After a fantastic tour over the world, they’ve seemingly found time to release an inbetween-albums single, along with a shiny new video to go with it. Perhaps to just keep interest flowing, perhaps simply an instinctive output, perhaps the product of shutting their label up, pestering them for new material. Whichever reason, this song could be a hint of things to expect, or the final throw from the Puzzle canon – altogether, it’s ridiculously brilliant. This is Mountains.

As far as intros go, it’s a standard Biffy Clyro piano lament complete with the over-gilded multi-tracked vocals, the very same that suffocated their last album for me. As far as verses go, it’s another Biffy-by-numbers staccato affair but nonetheless, works fine. So what do we have for the chorus?
Imagine the wind blowing in your hair on a cliff. The earth rocking under your feet. The seas below crashing in five hundred-feet waves. Yep; that pretty much describes the heart of Mountains’ chorus. ‘I am a mountain; I am the sea; You can’t take that away from me’ – air-punching stuff, eh? This is what’s to be loved about Biffy Clyro: amid all the catchy time-signatures and dodgy bar lengths, their songs have a real soul about them. This track in particular is proof of that.

A jump into double-time brings the song excitingly into a simple, but oh-so-effective reversal in the lyrics: ‘You are my mountain; You are my sea’. Without taking another breath the guitars and bass plunges into a final chorus, the final half-bar in a capella. All these great ideas, executed with expert aplomb, carry this tune up into league with Biffy’s best songs, or at least the most well-written ones.

A few little niggles stop it getting full marks from me: above all, the fucking guitar is not loud enough. At all. Nope. Sorry. Not loud enough. The vocals suffer from this unfortunately; they sound too polished without the envelope a loud guitar provides. Also, as I’ve already said before, the singing in the introduction would have sounded best with one main vocal with a second half-volume. This would’ve gotten the same good effect, without the crappy sheen that identical vox make. Alas, I can’t be in the studio with them to point all these factors out: I simply don’t have the time, and they simply can’t afford me. That’s the price criticism comes at, readers. NME, take heed.

Mountains truly is a rocker of epic proportions, all contained in a neat three minutes-and-twenty seconds. If I could have been at Reading Festival (four-hundred quid a ticket!?), I would’ve jumped around like a maniac and damaged my lungs screaming every word of this back at them. This is an amazing song, an amazing band, and hopefully an amazing album on the way.

Overall – 9 / 10
Get it? – Yes. Mon’ the Wiffy.