Mountain Time Released New Album, “Dream Homes”

Spartan Records and Chris Simpson are excited to announce the surprise release of Dream Homes, the Texas-based indie-rock veteran’s brand new, nine-song full-length album under his celebrated Mountain Time moniker. In the loving hands of long-time creative collaborators and first time co-producers Seth Woods (of The Whiskey Priest and Casita Records) and Alex Dupree — both accomplished artists and songwriters in their own right — the meticulous level of care and craft found here on Dream Homes is compelling, and the invitation to communion feels warm and ecstatic. 

Imbuing, string-soaked ’70s balladry and soaring ambient rock with an at times jazz-like freneticism, Dream Homes is a joyous romp through the kaleidoscopic vision of Simpson’s mind and pen, his unmistakable croon more confident and focused than ever, leading the listener through a vast menagerie of dream-time landscapes. Resembling little more than himself at this point, the album is a tip of the hat to longest-standing muses The Innocence Mission or something like the chaotic glory of Big Star’s Third. 

Since his early days in the mid-’90s dispensing wails and whimpers atop the quiet-loud emotive blasts of Texas legends Mineral, and the early-2000s’ more synthesized (but no less bombastic) The Gloria Record, Chris Simpson has blazed an increasingly mysterious and self-determined trail with his Zookeeper and Mountain Time projects. And while the former arrived in 2006 as a surprising left turn of Van Morrison, Bob Dylan & The Band and The Kinks apostleship — best heard on Spartan Records’ vinyl reissue/compilation Saint Francis, Zookeeper (2021) — and culminated in the stark self portrait of 2014’s Pink Chalk, giving way to broader strokes and the Radiohead via John Cale palette of the latter’s 2020 debut, Music For Looking Animals, Mountain Time’s latest LP, Dream Homes, finds Simpson’s storied past at once integrated and dissolved in an impossibly grand ocean of sound.