Black Mountain - BlackMountain

Mon 11th Apr, 2005 in Music Reviews

Let me explain it this way.

Imagine yourself a restless sort of teen at the cusp of the eighties. Fads and styles are coming and going at an obscene rate. Nothing different from the previous 25 years of rock and roll, then. Excepting the layers of makeup on the guys, as much as the gals. New wave is bringing in some new sounds, exciting and groundbreaking (fuck me, you just have to look at the alternative top ten for the past six months to see the influence still being exerted).

But the reliance on eyeliner and bouffants and video clips is starting to leave you feeling disillusioned and hollow, even if a lot of the records can still grab you. It’s almost as if it isn’t about the music anymore, you’re starting to think. But you don’t want to tell anyone, ‘cause school can be a pretty shitty place when you have no friends.

Imagine then yourself in that very position. Instead, you’re starting to dig the sounds coming from your older brother’s room. But he’s a jerk. An embarrassment. He wears flannelette. So you keep quiet. One Saturday afternoon your uncle comes round to drop off an esky so your folks can bugger off for the evening. You get chatting. He mentions some stuff that sounds cool, that you’ve never heard of. The next day, after your parents drop back the esky, they return with a paper bag. It’s a handful of albums your uncle had mentioned. “Give em back when you’re ready,” the note reads.

Black Mountain may just be that cool uncle. Their self titled album manages to melt that previous 25 years of rock, jazz, funk and boogie into less than fifty minutes of jaw dropping riffs, skronk, soul and stoner chorus like none other I’ve heard in recent history. If I hear a better ‘new’ album this year its going to have to be a 24 carat cut dripping straight from God’s sinuses.

Black Mountain is a Canadian arts collective, God help ‘em. Now, when I think of arts collectives I think of poetry readings, and pottery wheels and paper mache representations of humanity and its plight in a barren society. These guys could almost restore your faith in the power of community. If such a thing existed these days. Their influences have been listed as the usual Stones-Zep-Velvets axis with a dash of Can and Blue Cheer for extra stoner credibility. You may hear all that in there but from the opening lick that prefaces the album, I hear Albert Ayler, Pharaoah Sanders and John Coltrane struggling to drag a rock n roll group up the mountain to see the face of God. The fact that they never get there makes the music all the more powerful – it’s the struggle that counts, y’see. Victory means shit, ‘cause where there is victory there is nothing left to strive for.

Black Mountain is music for those who search through the songs they listen to: who want a little bit of community, but would rather go it alone. The speaking in tongues of the two album highlights No Hits (as in ‘no hits in the modern age’) and Modern Music (as in ‘we can’t stand your modern music’) comes courtesy of non-band member Masa Anzai, and such is the force of the saxophone on these tracks that it all but overshadows the remainder. Play it again, Anzai, like its 1965, and Coltrane and Sanders are dueling it out at his last gig. But over a Stones song, not a polyrhythmic African soup. If you fall deep for what is oddly known as free jazz, you’ll wanna scream at the stars listening to this stuff.

Elsewhere, album closer Faulty Times recalls the Velvet Underground on their most luxurious trips, or maybe any of those more atmospheric Kraut bands (possibly Amon Duul). It lets the keys hang suspended above a simplistic (for them, anyway) mantra. Similar in effect to Druganaut, though that starts as a mini James Brown jam, turns into a bit of Zeppelin homage, before returning to the autobahn, so to speak, in No Hits.

No Satisfaction stands apart from the rest of the material in that you couldn’t imagine it existing in the seventies. Of the other seven songs, I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Jagjaguwar sent out a press release and proclaimed this album some kinda audio Ern Malley: that it was, in fact, tracks found on a master tape from about ‘78, never released due to the rising popularity of punk.

Of course, when I say Black Mountain may well be your cooler older brother, I am in no way saying they are cool. They would have long hair, would scarcely meet your eye in conversation, and they sure as hell wouldn’t have a girlfriend. Their parents would long have despaired of them ever getting a real job, and Creem would be jerking themselves off to find the best similes and metaphors. This is music for music nerds, pure and simple. Lie back with the headphones on and remember why you never got yourself a real job when you could have. Black Mountain are so fucking good they make me want to be a music journalist one day.