For most rock bands, naming an album IV may imply a lack of imagination, but coming from such studious classic-rock scholars as Black Mountain, it's a gesture loaded with significance. As history has shown, hard-rock bands tend to view their discographies like batting orders, and—whether officially or otherwise— a numerically branded "IV" has come to represent the clean-up hitter stepping up to the plate with the bases loaded. It's the moment where bands capitalize on established strengths and set out for parts unknown. And Black Mountain's IV plays the fourth-album role to a tee, rolling up the weed-scented riffage of their 2005 self-titled debut, the prog-sized ambitions of In the Future, and the pop-focussed finesse of Wilderness Heart, all while embracing electronics with a zeal that suggests the band's relationship with modern music has become somewhat less tortured.
But despite its highly evocative title, IV doesn't so much relive classic-rock history as suggest a different course for it. By the late 1970s, many dinosaur rock acts had either gone disco or at least slickened up their sound to compete with it. And through that process, the synthesizer would come to represent a musical cancer to purists, the agent through which the majesty of rock got diluted into nancy-boy new wave and poofed-up hair-metal power ballads. IV, however, reminds us that technologically curious early adopters like Rush, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd were among the original synth-pop bands, using push-button machinery to expand and enhance their fantastical vision rather than cloud it. IV, accordingly, is the sound of a Black Mountain that holds 2112 and "Subdivisions" in equally high regard, that gets as much mileage out of In Through the Out Door as "Black Dog," and that has upgraded its joint-assembly surface of choice from Meddle to The Wall. It presents an alternate '80s where the progressive, guitar-powered rock that dominated the preceding decade successfully adapted to pop's synth-centric shift, instead of becoming an instant anachronism.
But even if Jeremy Schmidt's keyboard rig gets as much of a workout here as Stephen McBean's effects-pedal board, by this point, Black Mountain possess a peculiar personality that transcends their throwback stoner-rock rep. That's in large part due to the singular beauty-and-the-beard dynamic between vocalists Amber Webber and McBean, whose unnervingly calm yet often dread-ridden vocals make them sound like that strange, water bottle-hoarding couple down the road whose end-times prophecies just might be coming true. Secure in that foundation, Black Mountain can confidently send their referentialism into overdrive, pilfering their record collections for musical, lyrical and spiritual inspiration but giving it their own subversive spin.
Sometimes, the nods don't go beyond the titles. "Florian Saucer Attack" manages to pack in shout-outs to two avant icons in its three-word name, though the song itself is an exhilarating, asphalt-ripping robo-rocker that sounds like Webber doing donuts from behind the wheel of the Knight Rider's KITT. "(Over & Over) The Chain," meanwhile, has nothing to do with the name-checked MC5 or Fleetwood Mac classics—rather, its protracted, synth symphony intro lures you into some late-night occult ceremony, with McBean's squealing guitar solo unsubtly evoking the tortured cries of a human-sacrifice candidate being burned alive.
Other quotes are more subtle and sly: the splendorous electro-psych sea shanty "You Can Dream" takes its chorus refrain from Bruce Springsteen's favourite Suicide song; the acoustic-powered goth-pop of "Cemetery Breeding" wraps its meditations on dying friends in an appropriately spooked synth riff straight out of David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes." But, occasionally, Black Mountain can't resist unabashed homage: from its droning, fever-dream ambience to its slack acoustic strums to its drowsy drum fills, "Crucify Me" is the proud, pouch-baby spawn of Big Star's "Kangaroo." (That said, McBean and Webber's gorgeous, honey-dipped harmonies imagine what could've been had Alex Chilton tightened up the song just enough to get it onto late-'70s soft-rock radio.)
When they first emerged 12 years ago, Black Mountain appeared to be the long-haired, tattooed antidote to fellow Vancouverites the New Pornographers—a supergroup ensemble corralled by a local scene veteran that stripped hard rock of macho cliché just as the New Pornographers gave skinny-tied power pop some extra width. Black Mountain are still referring to that original playbook: like early signature track "Don't Run Our Hearts Around," IV's opener "Mothers of the Sun" is a withering protest anthem sandwiched by a tectonic plate-shifting riff that leaves a greater impression than the verses and choruses. But this time out, Black Mountain redirect their bulldozing boogie into a funky, soul-clapped breakdown and laser show-worthy synth solo, showing how they've progressed beyond simple rock-and-awe tactics. And nowhere is that sense of patience more pronounced than in IV's nine-minute closer, "Space to Bakersfield," an airy, eerie sci-fi lullaby that finds McBean and Webber ominously repeating the song's two-line lyric like adrift astronauts whose oxygen supply is about to run out. Where they once aspired to be your blood-pumping druganaut, Black Mountain now excel at the art of making you uncomfortably numb.
