These BOBBY songs are mountains. They are mountainous. They exude some of the qualities that you'd expect out of mountaineers. They've got qualities that you'd expect out of those types of folks who never come out of their rooms - as long as they have all of their records and books with them in there. They don't need anything outside of those walls. They've got the qualities of those mushing a team of dogs, attached to a sled, through the darkest and coldest parts of Canada - over mountains. They come inside, whip off their two layers of stocking hats, their coats and their insulated pants and stand there steaming like a kettle. When they first enter, their whiskers were holding thick, white icicles and those quickly melt into a pool of room temperature water at their wet feet, to be toweled up whenever they get to it. BOBBY songs seem to come down to us from on high, from the tippy tops of gigantic rock formations. They are sounds that feel born right before your very eyes. You see them walking and then running. It's like watching a time-lapse video recording of a storm that forms and builds, rumbles toward you, overtakes everything around you and then kindly disappears down the road. You're in awe of the system in three different ways when you can see it from such a vantage point - where it passes through you, goes over top of your head AND travels mostly beneath you as well. You have storm up, down and around and it's scary and invigorating. You respect its potential energy, it's kinetic energy and then you respect that it's leaving you alone and bothering someone else. You think that this must have been what the ground felt before these mountains pronounced themselves up and through it, displacing it. It must have first felt like a toothache, with sore gums and then the upheaval. The band, which consists of Tom Greenberg, Molly Erin Sarle, Amelia Randall Meath, Paolo Menuez, Justin Labat, Martin Zimmerman and Roby Moulton - or various configurations of the bunch, makes a sound that feels like this sort of overtaking. It's all of them and it comes at us like a swarm of voices and non-church sounds, overwhelming us the way a church choir could overwhelm us - with an unadulterated sensation of filling a room with blind faith and emotion in something that no one singing or playing could ever explain.