Sound Advice: Country Folk Duo The Montvales Release Moving Sophomore Effort

This story is featured in CityBeat’s Jan. 24 print edition.

Originally from Knoxville, Tenn. until a recent move, Cincinnati is lucky enough to claim rising country folk duo The Montvales — at least for now.

The duo is set to release their cinematic and resonant new record, Born Strangers, with a celebration at the Woodward Theater on Feb. 2. The record is seemingly full of potential singles and standouts that seem poised for radio play, accompanying scenes on movie screens or ringing out through large venues and beyond.

The Montvales are Sally Buice on banjo and Molly Rochelson on guitar, both handle vocals, often in harmony combining the timelessness of Southern American musical traditions with an immediate, contemporary twist.

The pair were introduced by their parents as kids around the age of 13 and were “immediate friends,” quickly making music together, Buice tells CityBeat. After moves for college and some temporary relocating during their early 20s, the two joined back up in 2019. Their first full-length album, Heartbreak Summer Camp, was released in 2020, just before the start of the pandemic.

Buice says the duo moved to Cincinnati in a kind of “blind leap of faith” after housing prices started going up around their native Knoxville and because they loved Cincinnati’s architecture, parks and “everything about Northside,” along with the better chance of financial survival for working musicians. Rochelson adds, “We feel really lucky to have landed in such a vibrant community.”

Born Strangers is their second full-length album. This time, the album has production help from Mike Eli LoPinto, guitarist for Chris Stapleton, and engineering from Sean Sullivan. LoPinto also helped put together what Rochelson calls, “a killer crew of musicians” to fill out the sound.

The duo’s soaring harmonies, raw emotional delivery and peaks of life-lived heartbreak and enthusiasm are more apparent than ever, accented by the instrumentation and larger-scale atmosphere of the recordings. At the core are the themes, arrangements and delivery that have made The Montvales a standout all along.

Of the writing for the record, Buice tells CityBeat, “We wrote most of this album while we were living together in a tiny house and reckoning with the world spinning off its rocker throughout the pandemic.”

The songs cover what sounds like a range of themes and topics, from breakups to biblical floods. “This record is a lot of us looking at other people’s stories: a young person dealing with Tennessee’s restrictive abortion laws, a neighbor displaced by gentrification, etc., but there’s a lot on here that’s really personal,” Rochelson tells CityBeat.

Rochelson adds, “The album is deeply place-based, drawing inspiration from Knoxville, Sally’s stint on a ranch in southern Colorado and our eventual move to Cincinnati.” The songs are filled with landscapes, deserts, countrysides, mountain ranges and old familiar sites around town that bring back memories, like liquor stores and YMCAs.

In one of the first singles from the album, “Lou,” Buice recalls a mountain range and hopes that it will be preserved for the future to experience.

There seems to be an overarching theme of redemption or defiance, or even celebration in the face of fear and heartbreak. On the opening track, “Woman of God” the two sing: “Some days I don’t trust a single person/if there’s a point, it’s one that I can’t see/but I’m gonna make something good from this, even if it is the death of me.”

On “Bad Faith,” a standout track among many Rochelson and Buice sing: “It’s a bad faith deal that they made you, honey/gonna set you up, just to knock you down/there’s no way/ just gotta keep on running/ain’t the end of the world this time around.”

“Say the Word” revels in the excitement and uncertainty of relationships while touching on near anthemic level, while “New Year’s Eve” is nearly celebratory in the face of fear.

Rochelson tells CityBeat, “You can kind of hear us parsing out our worldview in real-time informed in equal part by the evolution of the relationships in our lives and, also, the Marxist-feminist literature we were avidly consuming at the time. It was a tumultuous season, but the album turned out surprisingly upbeat. I think it documents our determination to show up for the folks around us and force a better world into existence.”

On “Through the Night” they sing: “In the age of information, I’m just going off a hand-drawn map and a feeling that won’t budge,” and it seems to be working, so far.

“We’re excited to invite a whole cast of friends onstage with us,” Buice tells CityBeat. Buice and Rochelson will be accompanied by Aaron Cordell on drums, Rae Fisher on bass, Hanna Rae Mathey on fiddle and Holden Bitner on cello. Local Americana singer-songwriters Jordan Smart and Maria Carrelli will open the show.

The Montvales perform at the Woodward Theater Feb. 2 at 8 p.m. Info: woodwardtheater.com.

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