Music you might expect to be addressed in this review that won't be: David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin. Predictable band that can't reasonably be elided: The Velvet Underground. Remember when everyone was talking about how much the Strokes sounded like the Velvet Underground, and you just couldn't hear it? Couldn't reconcile (maybe barring Julian Casablancas's dopesick drawl) the Strokes's concise packets with VU's sprawling quagmires? Chalk it up to a sort of parallax, VU appearing differently depending on where you stand: Casablancas was listening to "White Light White Heat"; you were listening to "Sister Ray".
Chances are good that Stephen McBean has also spent the bulk of his VU time trolling the murky 17-minute depths of "Sister Ray", if we can take his songwriting choices on this Black Mountain EP at face value. The rating's a tad lower than you might expect because this already slim four-song EP only contains one unreleased track, an acoustic version of Black Mountain's "No Satisfaction". We also get an extended version of "Druganaut" from the same album; "Buffalo Swan", the B-side of the Druganaut single; and "Bicycle Man", from a split seven-inch with Destroyer. Paucity of new material aside, the rock, as anyone familiar with Black Mountain's consistently winning LP might predict, is top-slot, unreconstructed vintage scuzz.
Black Mountain is a good reminder that people were playing stoner rock long before the modern coinage debuted: Like VU, they play rock music suited to more dangerous, debilitating drugs than a Queens of the Stone Age fan's mid-grade hydro. Nowhere is Black Mountain's affinity for opiated murk more apparent than on this extended version of "Druganaut". Like drugs, rock music is a shortcut to a desired physical derangement, so the comparison isn't poetic license, and if a lot of modern rock focuses on the clench-jawed climax, "Druganaut" is the sloe-eyed, languorous comedown. Packed with terse repetition and understatedly virtuosic flourishes, this version gives you more time to sink beneath the dark surface of the song, a surface comprised of a handful of plodding chords, cavernous vocals, some buzzing synths and a few attention-getting peaks. But it's more about waves, ambiguously lapping, than concrete forms; a downer-fed bliss-out.
"Buffalo Swan" is a similarly poky long-haul. Call it Black Palace: It sounds remarkably like Will Oldham's take on psych-rock might, especially the gloomy vocal, with a mid-section so squiggly and spaced out it might disintegrate without the mesmerizing rhythm track to keep it together. But by the end, the guitar finally wanders over to the bassline to cross the finish line in tandem. "Bicycle Man" implies that McBean's spent some time with the poppier side of VU as well, as he trades wails with Amber Webber over a peppy vamp, and "No Satisfaction (Campfire Version)" rollicks and rattles along like the Rolling St-- damn. I broke my promise.
