Send "Black Mountain " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 "Is it safe for the cowards to do what they've already done?" It's a rhetorical question, of course, but coming from the well-bearded mouth of Stephen McBean, the sentiment is especially pointed. For in his 10-plus years of making music, McBean has never been one to retrace his steps, venturing outward from the dirgey folk-rock of Jerk With a Bomb to the ever mercurial noise-pop of Pink Mountaintops and the earthquaking boogie of his most successful outfit to date, Black Mountain. But even the popular perception of Black Mountain as 1970s-style riff-mongers is unfairly myopic, with the seeming anomalies in their discography-- the carefree jangle pop of "No Satisfaction", the hypno-drone trance of "No Hits", or the raised-lighter sing-along "Stay Free"-- proving just as prevalent as the Black Sabbath worship. In their heart of hearts, Black Mountain are really just peaceful hippies, but ones who aren't afraid to deploy heavy artillery to assert and protect their way of living. (Run their hearts around at your own risk: If their philosophy could be displayed on a VW microbus bumper sticker, it would read "Make Love Then War.")On the band's third album, Wilderness Heart, there's a more concerted effort to reconcile the band's inner darkness and light, a symbiosis reflected in their choice of producers: Randall Dunn, best known for his work with doom-metal giants Boris and Sunn O))), and D. Sardy, whose lengthy list of multi-platinum clients includes Oasis and the Rolling Stones. Couple those big-name producers with the decision to record in L.A., not to mention their mainstream toe-dip on the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack, and all signs point to Wilderness Heart's being Black Mountain's go-for-broke commercial bid. But while the new album is certainly more streamlined and luminous than 2008's weighty, apocalyptic In the Future-- no 17-minute prog-rock suites to be had here-- the sharper focus doesn't dilute the band's cannabis-clouded cool. In FM-radio terms, Wilderness Heart is Black Mountain's Houses of the Holy, an album that shimmers as much as it bulldozes, humors as much as it rages, while flexing a more pronounced pop sensibility that mostly works in the band's favor rather than to their detriment. And just as John Paul Jones' Mellotron-based set piece "No Quarter" was arguably the highlight of Houses, Wilderness Heart's most striking moments come courtesy of keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt-- his thick, Deep Purplish tones on the Camaro-rattling "Old Fangs" prove heavier than the glam-metal riff chugging underneath it, and instead of dropping in the de rigueur guitar solo, the band lets him slather on dreamy layers of laser-beam synth drones. Likewise, his Mellotronic backdrops on the stoner-folk reveries "Radiant Hearts" and "Buried by the Blues" refashion these downcast acoustic interludes in a more majestic light....full text |
| Drownedinsound |
| The video for the splendidly-titled ‘Hair Song’, Wilderness Heart’s opener and Black Mountain’s latest statement of nostalgic intent, is a weird one. And not just because the whole Canadian-band-meets-forest-setting thing it hinges on is reminiscent of nothing so much as Bryan Adams’ ‘(Everything I do) I Do It For You’ video. No, it’s the cocktail of Almost Famous-style hippie-fringes‘n’guitars imagery, of Eighties skateboarding movies, of unambiguously Noughties settings and equipment, alongside flashes of a rather self-conscious wistfulness (for its lovely female protagonist with lovely hair still buys her records on vinyl, see) that’s most disconcerting. It ends up resembling the clever-retro of Tarantino’s Grindhouse, which you’re sure is set in the early Seventies until you see a character using a mobile phone. And in doing so begs a question that one rarely associates with albums that are actually, y’know, good and stuff: just how ironic is this supposed to be? It’s a question Black Mountain managed to sidestep with their first two records for three main reasons: Black Mountain and In The Future were so energetically shameless in their looting of rock’s founding texts that they ended up sounding like a band revelling in the fact that they “can’t stand all your modern music” (‘Modern Music’) rather than thinking too hard about the implications of theft. They were constructed with an audacious 'we’ll do a seventeen-minute track if we want to' intensity that made all the recycling sound striking and hip (which, let’s face it, Hawkwind never were) rather than postmodern (see Mars Volta) or just plain stupid (see Wolfmother). And Black Mountain and In The Future both knew, when the time came, how to swing, with big ol’ five-chord breakdowns galloping alongside sketchier little grooves, such as ‘No Satisfaction’ on the former and ‘Evil Ways’ on the latter. Wilderness Heart’s opening flurry of tracks announces, on the other hand, a lot more reference-point plunder and not much else besides. Three four-minute tracks, one anthemic, one chugging, and one all acoustic harmonies. Three twenty-second intros, three verse-chorus-verse-chorus structures, three underwhelming instrumental sequences. And most worrying of all, even those reference-points are for the first time a tad suspect. Hints of, horror of horrors, Foo Fighters make themselves known towards the end of ‘Hair Song’ and go on to fully define ‘Old Fang’’s chunky choruses, whilst the former’s resemblance to My Morning Jacket is trumped by the latter’s to Kenny goddam Loggins – yes, the ‘Highway to the Dangerzone’ Top Gun guy. We’re talking, in short, bastardised versions of canonical rock rather than the proper stuff....full text |
| Guardian |
| Following Tame Impala's album a few weeks ago, here's another release from a band who want to party like it's 1969.The third from this Vancouver outfit is a heavy rock album like they used to make back then, on which every thundering piece of stoner metal is matched by an acoustic reverie – a yin and yang seen in the sharing of vocals between Stephen McBean and Amber Webber. There's some nonsense in the lyrics – McBean's assertion on Let Spirits Ride that "the rudimentary force of life is shining through the gate of heaven's door" sounds like something from a particularly unhelpful self-help book, but when it's set to such a thundering riff, that's easy to forgive. Black Mountain actually sound more supple when they open the throttle, as on Old Fangs, than when they're trying to be restrained: while this might be an album modeled after early Led Zeppelin, they lack Zeppelin's lightness of touch on the acoustic numbers. Still, there's nothing to disappoint, even if Wilderness Heart never quite scales the peaks of the band's wondrous live performances....full text |
Black Mountain lyrics
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