Picking out the constituent peaks in the playfully grizzled Black Mountain rock collective is a sober task. Mapped out, the members of Black Mountain, Pink Mountaintops, Blood Meridian, and Lightning Dust resemble a topographic chain with shifting features-- a drummer moves here, a bassist plays for this band, sometimes, and so forth. For Blood Meridian, the hashchild of Black Mountain bassist Matthew Camirand, the mission is clear: Create rust-belt ballads that sound like the bawdy, direct, rye-drenched barroom underneath Black Mountain's splashy art studio.
Liquidate Paris!, a limited-edition, nine-song CD and vinyl release from Michigan's Elevation Recordings, is the latest Blood Meridian record, and the follow-up to 2006's Kick Up the Dust. Liquidate Paris! has all the elements of Blood Meridian's sound: dusty vocals, guitar lines like steel twine, trotting, patient drums, and occasional moments of tremolo guitar. As durable and effective as their sonics are, there's a bewildering set of mixed messages on Liquidate Paris!. The title, taken from Danish author's Sven Hassel pulp WWII novels, proclaims a set of intentions: brutal, visceral, and portentous. Even better, it's an album title fitting for their band's name-- that in itself an explicit nod to contemporary lit-don Cormac McCarthy's agnostic, blood-fed opus.
The products, however, barely resemble the intentions laid out in the title. The nine ballads here are lyrically derivative-- "We were drunk as fuck/ We were down on our luck"-- and more plaintive and petty than any of songs in their catalog. Where Camirand was at least giddily petulant on Kick Up the Dust, here the lyrics are ham-fisted in their solipsism ("Some people say I'm out of my head/ But they don't see what I see") and maudlin in their stabs at romance ("Turning slowing to the beating of your chest/ Ocean breezes sticking to your skin/ The world goes on without you, while you remember everything she said").
Trailblazing lyrical insight isn't Blood Meridian's forte, but there's no getting around how detrimental the songwriting is to the overall craft. There are stirring musical moments here-- the glistening piano on "Walk Through the Door" for instance-- but they are nullified by lyrical passivity. Blood Meridian aren't designed for dramatic peaks and vistas-- they deal in nostalgic compositions and have influences (Leonard Cohen's moods, Neil Young's settings, the Replacements' adolescent disappointment) inseparable from their form-- but even the modest hills in a range deserve resonant words.
