Black Mountain

On the verge of releasing a new album next month, Vancouver’s Black Mountain should poise itself for another tidal wave of accolades. In the Future is an album too ridiculously good to fully comprehend at first. It unveils as an arsenal of meticulously assembled, yet freely executed songs that plunge the listener into a familiar haven of dense, eerie rock ‘n’ roll, where walls collapse around you to the blistering sounds of crisp, yet grinding guitars, and trembling vocals from both Stephen McBean and Amber Webber. This is the disarming nature of the Black Mountain experience.

On the phone from the band’s European tour van, guitarist-vocalist McBean reflects on 2007, and the feedback the band has gotten as he crosses onto Netherlands soil. “It was really nice playing the new record,” he says. “No one was booing, or yelling out old songs. It was kind of what we wanted to do, to go out and tour and play music without an album to sell or whatever.”

Well, not yet. On January 22, the band releases In the Future, its second full-length, and will likely begin another series of tours across North America and Europe.

“Nowadays with records it’s kind of weird,” continues McBean, his voice a little fatigued from sitting on a bus for some eight hours straight. “Because people hear them ‘cause of the internet or whatever… they get around anyway before they come out, so it’s our way of playing the album first.”

A few new songs have surfaced, namely the eight-minute-long epic “Tyrants”, which was previously posted on the band’s website. Having Black Mountain’s music available for free doesn’t bother McBean, so much as the lack of quality and timing involved in downloading an album prior to its release. “I guess it’s because we put a lot of heart and time into it,” he explains. “We hope people hear it as we intended, at least the first time. And we’re all big into the whole thing of album cover art and stuff.”

Speaking of which, the cover to In the Future is an optical illusion best studied under the influence of a clear and lucid mind, or one tinged with a toxic fog compliments of your current vice. Not that there is any such thing, but its not typical Black Mountain artwork, or what one would expect it to look like. “Jeremy [Schmidt, keyboards] did a pretty swell job on the cover,” McBean says with a laugh. “When I first saw it, I was like, ‘Cool! What the fuck is it? What does it mean?’”

Actually, here’s another ‘what the fuck is it, what does it mean’-type question: what does it mean when Black Mountain shows up on the soundtrack album Spider-Man 3: Music from and Inspired By? What is it that inspired McBean and company to write and record its contribution to that particular action-packed thrill-ride, the luminous, acoustic-falsetto lament “Stay Free”? “The truth, or a good lie?” inquires McBean. “That’s one of those things where it seems funny, kind of like the Coldplay thing [the band opened for Coldplay for a series of dates in 2005]. [Producer] Dave Sardy kinda knew Matt [Camirand, bass] from his old band, or something. He got put in charge of putting the soundtrack out on his label and picking the bands.” Adds the singer, “I think only five of those bands on there are actually in the movie. I don’t know. I’ve only seen the first Spider-Man movie. We got a few Spider-Man dolls. I gave them to my friend’s kids.”

Two-thirds through its current tour, or threequarters by Schmidt’s quick calculations, the band looks forward to some well-earned rest come January. But having seen their fair share of the bizarre, quaint and genuinely exciting, Black Mountain still seems as stoked to play shows in new cities every night, as much as the band would also like to get back home and relax. It’s a dichotomy that has served them well, as McBean describes the band’s work ethic as anything but rushed, especially regarding recording. “…With this tour, and the tour before, we’re playing stuff like ‘Bright Lights.’ …It was a Jerk With a Bomb song, so it’s, like, seven years old. It took a long time to get it right.”

McBean doesn’t mince words or take for granted what he and his friends do as a second job, the main line of work for many of them being attendants at Vancouver’s safe injection facility, Insite. “I kind of can’t wait to get home and fiddle around with tracks,” admits McBean, “but we’re lucky to get to go to Prague and play our songs in front of 150 people. We feel lucky for it. It makes it fun. And it feels weird when you play in Italy or something, and there’s five or 10 Italians singing along to ‘Druganaut.’ It just breathes a different life into it. If we were just practicing, we’d die of boredom.”

Despite being a deified “it” band from the West Coast, Black Mountain’s individual experiences have also lent themselves to a humble attitude and an ability to let the hype roll off their backs. “Most of us had been touring our whole lives,” notes McBean, citing the benefits of filling his band with seasoned musicians. “It made things a little easier, which was kind of nice.”

McBean continues: “There’s good shows, there’s bad shows, but reactions here… the way people react to music is totally different from country to country. From Spain to Germany, wherever, it’s strange… In every city there’s at least a few people where the music really meant a lot to them, and in a way it kind of made us a little teary-eyed. It’s kind of that way when you’re a teenager and you have a record… we tried to make a new record about a year and a half after the first record, but it didn’t seem right yet or focused enough, so we just left it and decided to record when it felt like the right time. I mean, we want to do it the right way as opposed to making a record just to put it out.”

Commercial ambitions be damned! These folks just want to make some good rock ‘n’ roll and hopefully have you buy it, artwork and all. Their world won’t stop spinning if they don’t make it onto another smash hit movie soundtrack or crazy-awesome festival tour. McBean, Schmidt, Camirand, Webber and drummer Joshua Wells are evidently just as content to chill out at the nearest tea and pannekoek house, or ride their bikes - even if the latter makes Jeremy “look like Fozzy Bear,” according to McBean.

And Black Mountain doesn’t have to necessarily be at home to feel at home. “Louisville, Kentucky is pretty rad and pretty homey. Just drinking beer and a bonfire in the back,” says McBean. “We kinda like Oslo, too. Glasgow has quite a homey feeling. It’s weird, even L.A. Maybe it’s because we know people there. There’s kind of a new L.A. brewing within the hell of L.A.”

Admittedly, I will say the notion of talking to anyone from Black Mountain seemed petrifying as much as it was unbearably exciting. They’re all incredibly friendly and open people, albeit with a certain streak of freak quality unique to their music. They just happen to be on the cusp of a major musical explosion from nowhere in particular, except their own minds and instruments - whether they know it or not.
Black Mountain Website
Black Mountain MySpace
Tyrants by Black Mountain
-Patricia Matos