Moving Mountains

It’s been seven years since New York’s Moving Mountains recorded their infectiously ambitious debut record, Pneuma, so it’s no surprise to find the quartet has grown into its own shoes a bit. What is pleasantly surprising, though: Despite abandoning some of the youthful vigor for a more subdued, palatable sound, Moving Mountains haven’t lost the visceral sincerity that has helped make Pneuma and its 2011 follow-up Waves cult classics in the spacey post-hardcore world. It thus seems only fitting that the band chose to self-title its third full-length; in a sense, the album marks the rebirth of the band, which has honed down its sound to a neatly precise brand of forlorn guitar-driven pop rock. Moving Mountains is not exactly mainstream radio fodder, but there are moments on the album when the band unabashedly channels some of the better moments of ’90s radio rock—frontman Gregory Dunn does a pretty convincing Johnny Rzeznik impression on “Eastern Leaves,” and the strummed acoustic “Chords” is pretty textbook Travis-esque Brit-pop—which is by no means a bad thing. Growing up is hard to do. But Moving Mountains have done it better than most.