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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Ha Ha Tonka’s “Heart-Shaped Mountain”

Music journalists like to ask unanswerable questions, and one of the most popular queries in our stringbag briefcases is, “Why isn’t [insert artist name here] the biggest thing going?” The problem is that hoary clichés are simply overused but completely appropriate observations, and so it is with Ha Ha Tonka, whose fifth album over the past decade races along like a steam locomotive with a fusion engine, the very definition of Americana and roots rock in the new millennium. There are certainly familiar traces of HHT’s brethren on Heart-Shaped Mountain, from the Kings Of Leon urgency on “Race To The Bottom” to the Heartbreakers’ intimate expanse on “Height Of My Fears” to the loping Old 97’s melancholic gallop on “The Party” to the Dawes-channels-glam balladry on “Telluride,” but it would be a mistake to invest those similarities with intent. Ha Ha Tonka filters its Ozark Mountains upbringing through the basic tenets of indie and classic rock, and organically crafts sounds that are reminiscent and yet uniquely its own. If these guys aren’t bigger, that’s on us, not them.

—Brian Baker