here are times when a record comes along and, on just a single spin, it clicks. The penny drops and you’re sold on the whole thing before you’ve even had a chance to check for dents. It’s instantly familiar. It’s instantly likable. It’s instantly worrying. The problem with music which is so immediately gratifying is that, on the same token, it’s also just as disposable. What once was your own special song, loved by you and no one else,  is soon regurgitated every half an hour on the radio, used as bed music on every television station going and ends up tantamount to fingers down a blackboard.  When I first heard There Is A Mountain I knew I loved it. Time to panic.

Common Prayer are a rag-tag bunch assembled and steered by Brooklyn’s Jason Sebastian Russo, whose fingers have been in a few music pies including bass duties for Mercury Rev, helping out his brother Justin with The Silent League and being the founding member of shoegazers Hopewell. With all this said, it comes as little surprise that There Is A Mountain finds itself on Big Potato Records, a label founded in part by Slowdive’s Neil Halstead.

Hard to pin down and easy to love, this is a melting pot of styles, instruments and found sounds. The album is full of ideas and flourishes, each track seemingly taking a new approach to how you construct a song. Guitars have been tuned just enough to be acceptable, where drums won’t do tin cans will, and why use one vocal when you’re so many in number? Where commonprayer is built on a click track, lazy finger-picked guitar and a wealth of samples and found sounds, Us Vs. Them is full of bombastic drums, sparkling piano beds of harmonies. You, Aloft’s short instrumental of backwards loops and layered strings is countered by American Sex, a quiet campfire song of just voices and acoustic, suddenly hijacked by warped tabla and bible-questioning vocal sample. While all the tracks have their differences there’s one thing that ties the whole thing together: melody. Lots and lots of melody.

Russo’s voice is thin and fragile but never lacks purpose and feeling. His subject matter often turns to love. Lyrics like “I’ve been singing in and out of tune, it’s always been to you” and “You and me, staring at the same ceiling” manage to tread the fine line where cuteness meets sincerity.  On Us Vs. Them he’s taking on the world with a loved one, “linked arms spining into the sunset in a lazy waltz.” Marriage Song, complete with pots and pans percussion, tea chest bass, drunk slide guitar and an I Want You (She’s So Heavy)-aping break down, talks of living in “a house built for mileage”.

Closing the album is the rousing singalong Everything and More. As more voices than you can count join in chorus (“We’re walking on water that’s turned into wine / I’ll take yours and you take mine / we are every little thing all of the time”) the tracks builds over a rising four-chord progression. As vocals grow in strength and instruments starts to teeter on the brink of going out of control the track shifts into second gear, Russo’s now screaming vocal drowned out by the cacophony of voices, cymbals, strings and brass. A cliché? Perhaps. Handled perfectly? Without doubt. Get the wrong person behind the desk and you’ll find a symphony orchestra on this quicker than you know it. What’s so brilliant about this is that it’s a small number of people playing it like they mean it.

Given a quick glance or a casual ear There Is A Mountain is ostensibly a pop record; it’s packed full of ear-worm melodies and, with the majority of tracks clocking in at around three minutes, it’s over in little more than a half hour. However, dig a little deeper and you’ll find an album which is fit to burst with ideas; it’s peppered with tricks, ticks and turns of phrase that are as clever as they are effective. There Is  A Mountain is an album you’ll love instantly, return to constantly and never tire of.