Less than two years have passed since the release of Wilderness Heart, the third and most concision-driven album to date by Vancouver glory-rock band Black Mountain. That relatively short span feels surprising in light of their latest release, a nine-song soundtrack for the post-apocalyptic surf film Year Zero. Combining edits of their best tunes from previous records with five new pieces that tug at the range of their oeuvre, the set feels like the sort of compulsory stopgap a band might make after years of inactivity, not at the time when you'd expect a new record. A little like a greatest hits, a little like a soundtrack, and a little like a collaborative art project, Black Mountain's 51 minutes of music for Year Zero serve as a reminder of how good this band has sometimes been and as a tease of the music they might still make.
Year Zero pulls from each of the three Black Mountain full-lengths, spanning from the first tune on the first album-- the squiggly freedom march "Modern Music", with its shrieking horns and shout-along stoned vocals-- to the cascading, sloganeering title track of the band's most recent LP. Black Mountain's best and most cohesive album, 2008's In the Future, is the only title to place two tracks here; an edit of "Tyrants" washes into the sound of waves before it's ready, while the masterfully sequenced "Bright Light" trims the jam fat to go from almost 17 minutes to just beyond 13. That cut affords a perfect transition into "Mary Lou", one of the five new pieces. Of the fresh takes, "Mary Lou" is the most prototypically Black Mountain, building from a slow-burn intro into a chanted hook that eventually smears into a great exit, guitars and keyboards and harmonies flickering quickly until they slowly burn away. It's the sort of Black Mountain ripper that would've fit best on In the Future.
Elsewhere, the band tries new looks, especially since Amber Webber handles lead vocals on all of them. (That's a fortunate look for the somewhat ill-conceived Year Zero, too, a film about a "new world" in which women seem to do little more than party, look sexy, and cheerlead beefy surfer bros.) Closer "Breathe" swoops into a broad shoegaze arch, her voice the light of relief through a web of distortion and saturation. During "Embrace Euphoria", she calmly reads the film's new-order credo-- a short poem epitomized by "Put down your possessions and follow us into the infinite"-- above a set of interlocking synthesizer hums and whirs. Webber also leads opener "Phosphorescent Waves", a march of drum machines and synthesizers that sounds at once foreboding and redemptive, the invocation correctly suggests dawn breaking after a night of violent squalls. She ends it with another poem, just as she opens "In Sequence", a placeholder piece of serial drum machines and synthesizers. Suggesting the elemental dance music of Manuel Göttsching overrun by his band Ash Ra Tempel, these three Black Mountain pieces don't force such psychedelic influences into rock'n'roll; instead, they suggest possibilities for the band by letting such ideas stand on their own merits. That is, on Year Zero, Black Mountain finally start to sound like an experimental rock band, not a rock band with experimental influences.
During Year Zero, director Joe G. cuts between these pieces, using the mass of music almost like a reel of footage-- cutting off sections, hopscotching between tracks, focusing on dramatic bits. At their respective bests, both the film and Black Mountain's music for it help tease out new, parallel elements about one other. At their most compelling, Black Mountain's long-form instrumental explorations imply a certain sense of danger-- all the pieces condense into a knotty mess, with guitars and synthesizers, drums and bass vying for room in claustrophobic conditions. In Year Zero, producer Joe G. keys on those moments, synching those uncertain bits with surfers who either emerge unscathed from a wave that seemed ready to wipe them or arrive frustrated, shaking the water from their hair on the shore while holding a snapped board. And whether it's the bass chug of "Mary Lou" or the slack-jawed insouciance of "Modern Music", Black Mountain's music is often pretty damn fun. And despite any escape-to-aquatic-Eden pretensions, Year Zero is a small movie with awesome shots of people on big waves. Somehow, a Canadian band named Black Mountain serves that purpose well.
