Prolificacy can be a death knell for a less-than epochal rock band, so Stephen McBean decided to diversify. The fruitful Vancouver singer/songwriter has, over the past few years, spread his yield among no less than three bands-- Pink Mountaintops, Black Mountain, and Jerk With a Bomb-- each exploring slight but intriguing variations on reference-happy rock'n'roll. His latest undertaking is Black Mountain, whose self-titled debut full-length is a rollicking, wildly adventurous reconfiguring of 1960s and 70s nostalgia that's as duty-bound to the present as it is sympathetic to the past.
Black Mountain hits somewhere between Jerk With a Bomb's stellar but more straightforward Pyrokinesis and Pink Mountaintops' smarmy, sex-laden brand of vespertine blues-- only jacked up a good 20 decibels. McBean's voice is pleasant and instantly recognizable; having such an established songwriter behind a freshman outing is a tremendous advantage, and Black Mountain seem to know it. When the band aren't venturing on plush, static jams, his coy bluesy vocals tether the songs in familiar melodic space.
Svelte and upbeat, opener "Modern Music" stands apart from the rest of the album. Over jellybone saxophone and scattershot drumming, McBean and sidekick Amber Webber take jabs at "another pop explosion" and claim they "can't stand all your modern music." It's a trite argument, but nevertheless one for which Black Mountain makes a compelling case. Ironically, "Modern Music" is the album's least anachronistic and, almost as if to spite itself, catchiest number. "Druganaut" fits better into the retro regalia the band revere, weaving a loose-limbed vamp that, besides a few simple chord changes, seldom varies but is gradually added to. The vocals don't drop until nearly two minutes in, but the gap is barely noticeable. After the vocals arrive, it's into a series of haymaker guitar stabs and beefy drum fills, followed by a beautiful guitar feature-- spotted with ran-backward licks-- that exemplifies Black Mountain's penchant for texture and sameness within traditionally peripatetic verse-chorus-verse structures.
When Black Mountain evoke glue-sniffing shredders of yesteryear such Blue Cheer and Led Zeppelin, their technique falls nearer to Galaxie 500 and the Velvet Underground, who forsook showmanship and dug deep in search of music's fundamental soul. "No Satisfaction"-- with its chunky strumming, honky-tonk piano, radiant plucked guitar and cheap-o sax-- most directly channels those aloof, technically slovenly forebears and, not surprisingly, is this album's best song. But there's nothing overtly sloppy about Black Mountain: Although it often wades in droning, repetitive passages, the album is impressively tight.
Some may hear these shopworn melodies and clamor "bar band." But if Black Mountain ever tried to make a night-to-night living in blues cover haunts, they'd do it by torching the stage and leaving patrons agog in WTF stares. The Vancouver quintet aren't some cabal of slack beer-bellied crooners; they can play their instruments, they have multi-chord vocabularies and, perhaps most importantly, they know how to give their songs proper recorded treatment. Black Mountain has that golden must-be-analog sound, with the perfect amount of tarnish to make the songs feel lived-in without burying them in fry grease.
Interestingly, Black Mountain are least effective at their most unpredictable. "Heart of Snow" resists structure, feeling out a plaintive acoustic strum before meeting up with a frail guitar and piano line, which meanders to a tense climax before erupting into a simplistic but captivating odd-time stomp. Unfortunately, the tension is drawn out as the band acquiesces back into a lugubrious Webber vocal passage, quashing the swelling momentum and rendering the eventual resolution less cathartic. "Don't Run Our Hearts Around" is the antithesis: the track is mercurial but calculated; its stilted operatic grandeur is a welcome bit of certainty. Orbiting the album's most generic and derivative riff, "Don't Run Our Hearts Around" starts with a clarion call-- a booming full-band hit or five-- then settles into a lurching unison guitar figure. The song seesaws for a bit, then has a mood swing and dives into a forlorn interlude, before picking up right where it left off and riding its central riff raw.
Black Mountain are about as referential as they come. But despite the obvious touchstones-- which, incidentally, fucking rule-- the band are affable and idiosyncratic enough to win over those who passed on recent retrofits like Comets on Fire's Blue Cathedral or My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves, and make those records' admirers practically cream themselves. Stephen McBean may be playing it safe by partitioning his rep, but the consistency and breadth of his work is staggering amid so many once-and-dones.
