The Hollow Mountain
Album Review

“I pray the hens are gonna lay / I pray the fires stay away / I pray
the power lines don’t fall / I pray I win at Power Ball.” Welcome to
Lake County, folks! Enjoy the views, just don’t get in the water… The
gravitational opposite of a liberal oasis, this is the part of Northern California where no Bay Area vacationer will ever be found,
unless they’re taking the scenic route to go shopping in Nevada City.
Somewhere on Highway 20, between getting gas at the Pomo Pumps and getting a milkshake at the funky Fosters Freeze, the traveler passes through a wild western portal, where the parched chaparral provides hospitable shelter for whiptails and other reptiles, the so-called Clear Lake has been polluted by runoff from an open-air mercury mine, and the looming view of Mount Konocti reminds you of the volcanic nature of this earth.

This is the landscape from which the Gill Brothers Band emerged, and
the inspiration for their new album, “The Hollow Mountain.” Named
after a Pomo tale about a hidden lake discovered inside Mount Konocti, where a family of blind fish swim, the album kicks like a hippie-catering classic rock station fighting for the FM airwaves
against an America-first country station. Spoiler: rock wins.

I met the Gill Bros at a dive bar in Eureka, where they opened their
set by playing Link Wray’s “Rumble” with so much outrageous energy
that they might as well have been auditioning for America’s Got
Talent. Me and the 15 other people there would certainly have voted
them to the next round. Guitars were hoisted above heads while
hammer-ons and pull-offs trilled, tongues emerged from mouths and
wiggled around, and that was just the beginning. They played the whole set with that kind of absurd energy, the tunes recalling the type of burnt cowpunk CDs I used to cherish as a teenager while driving around in the Sierra Foothills east of Sacramento, where I grew up: Uncle Tupelo, the Replacements, Against Me, Big Star. Fuck it, it was bringing me all the way back to the very first mix CD I ever Limewired together: Kansas, Boston, AC/DC. This shit rocked.

Enter “The Hollow Mountain:” 9 tracks in 36 minutes and 33 seconds, an auspicious set of numbers if ever I’ve seen one. Busting in with a
cranked up take on “Loch Lomond,” where the high and low roads all
lead to Clear Lake, the album rolls through a succession of jammers,
where no chorus is wasted. “The Creek” celebrates the miracle of
moving water in the thick heat of summer, “Keep on Dancing” discusses the preferred form of rock and roll exercise, and “Ballad of the Western Whiptail” tells the story of Liz and Jim and some other
monosyllabic Lake County characters looking for something solid to
hang their hats on.

The final track, and namesake for the album, “The Hollow Mountain”
introduces us to Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, colonizers of Clear
Lake, whose genocidal zeal earned them an early grave at the hands of
the Pomo. “Uncle Sam / your shadow follows me across the land.” Mount Konocti watched over it all, oblivious to attempts by colonizers to rename it Uncle Sam Mountain. The blind fish continue to swim inside the hollow mountain, still unseen by white settlers and scientists, and not for lack of looking.

The Gill Brothers Band has a sound and a set of songs here that mean
something to me, and probably to a lot of other folks that hail from
the uncool, conservative parts of Northern California. They know where they’re from, and they know what sounds good on a car stereo when the windows are rolled down because the AC doesn’t work and it’s 102 degrees outside. Look no further than the fact that they played their official album release show at a taqueria in Santa Rosa. That’s real, something not easy to find in the 21st century musical landscape.
Crank it up, folks, “The Hollow Mountain” is here for you…