Black Mountain at Lee’s Palace yesterday, March 5th

Black Mountain at Lee’s Palace
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

Line up:
Quest for Fire @ 8:30
Bon Iver @ 9:30
Black Mountain @ 10:30

Hailing from Vancouver, British Columbia, Black Mountain is a heavy, indie prog/metal/rock band composed of Stephen McBean, Amber Webber, Matt Camirand, Jeremy Schmidt and Joshua Wells. They have a sound rarely heard today, with clear influences from The Velvet Underground, Black Sabbath, Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, and the Rolling Stones. When I first saw them play at the Horseshoe Tavern in October, someone commented “these guys don’t know that it’s 2007″. I’m happy to report that they don’t know it’s 2008 today, either.

To illustrate the difference a few months can make in a band’s notoriety: I only found out Black Mountain was playing the Horseshoe in October days before the concert and was able to buy tickets easily, and tickets were still being sold at the door. Their performance that night blew me away – I go to a fair number of concerts, and I consider that to have been the best live show I’ve ever attended. When I heard they were coming to Toronto again in March, I immediately bought tickets, and was very glad I did so, as it sold out a week before the show. (I’m sure the positive write up in Now Magazine didn’t hurt.)

Lee’s Palace is a larger venue than the Horseshoe, and it was packed. I hadn’t heard of either of the opening bands, so I wasn’t expecting much. Oakley Hall and The Cave Singers opened for them in October and were rather underwhelming, so I was surprised when Quest for Fire took the stage. They were quite good, a bit awkward to start, but once they got their groove they played well enough that after the show I asked one of the members of the band where I could pick up a CD – apparently their debut album comes out in June. Bon Iver seemed to draw a lot of nodding heads, but their one-note whine failed to inflame my soul.

I stood front and centre when Black Mountain took the stage, beside a guy who opened for the Pink Mountaintops in an earlier west coast tour.¹ The mics were too low, not well balanced for the volume of the instruments, as a result much of Webber’s phenomenally ethereal vocals and McBean’s crooning were lost amidst the thrashing guitar and bass, and pounding drums of Joshua Wells.

Black Mountain have some very enthusiastic fans, such as the two men who continually shouted out songs they wanted to hear (one of which they actually obliged), and another gentleman who, as the band exited the stage after their epic two song encore, chanted “You can’t go!” for quite some time, further informing the now-empty stage that the band’s flight had been cancelled and they must come out to entertain him further. It was fairly amusing.

My introduction to the band’s music came in a round about way. I first encountered their older sister band, The Pink Mountaintops, in This Space for Rent, an obscure CBC pilot which ultimately did not get picked up.² The show was mediocre (as pilots tend to be), but the music was fantastic. Afterward, I searched online, found the show’s website, and e-mailed to find out what they were playing. The answer came back: The Pink Mountaintops.

Another search turned up the website of their label, Jagjaguwar.  At the time there was only the their first self-titled album and a 7″ single. I promptly bought the CD, and when it arrived many, many weeks later I immediately dug it. The entire CD is remarkable, from down and dirty “Bad Boogie Ballin’” to the wounded longing of “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy”, and the mellow “I (fuck) Mountains” to the jangly “Can You Do that Dance?” and “Sweet ‘69″.³ Though I think it was “Tourist in Your Town” that sold me on them utterly and completely.

The debut record — conceived at dawn, while high on a mix of trucker speed and Red Bull, and while sailing down a Colorado highway on route to Denver as the last decent Floyd record played on the cassette deck — was written and recorded in a month with [Stephen McBean's] friends Amber Webber, Joshua Wells, and Christoph Hofmeister. The fore-mentioned country drone stoned drug rock band Black Mountain lent limbs, lungs, and amplifiers to the festivities.

From Jagjaguwar, The Pink Mountaintops (self-titled)

Once upon a time Pandora.com used to work in Canada, and it was a few months after I made the Pink Mountaintops channel that I noticed a new CD from them had appeared: Axis of Evol. Bought it.⁴

Axis of Evol begins with a forboding spiritual called “Comas”, the kind that McBean and only a very few other songwriters of this generation could pull off. It includes the tone-setting lyrical phrase “I have been wrestling a dead angry deer, and she is still with me after all of these years’. The record then almost immediately ramps up into a thumping, buzzing, blissful haze, at various parts sounding like the Velvet Underground or Spacemen 3 or the Jesus and Mary Chain circa Psycho Candy. And at the end, the album then segues into a hypnotic, Smog-like meditation called “How We Can Get Free”. Throughout the record, McBean sings about love and war, the love of war, and the war of love — on the body, on the mind and on the soul.

From Jagjaguwar, The Pink Mountaintops, Axis of Evol

From there I discovered Black Mountain, the Pink Mountaintops’ sister group, and bought their self-titled album. While The Pink Mountaintops employs several guest artists, the core of Black Mountain’s features many of the same people: Stephen McBean, Amber Webber, Matt Camirand, Jeremy Schmidt and Joshua Wells.

Black Mountain’s sound is decidedly heavier than The Pink Mountaintops, but that said, in the first song on their self-titled album, “Modern Music” McBean groans “we can’t stand your modern music/we feel afflicted” and in another, “No Hits”, he sings “lemme holler against the pop star dream”. “Druganaut” is incredibly catchy, and the extended version on the EP of the same name even more so.

For the interested, I scored the drummer’s set list; they played:

• Stormy High
• Angels
• Queens Will Play
• Wucan
• Tyrants
• Druganaut
• Stay Free
• Evil Ways
• Bright Lights

I bought their latest, In the Future, at the show. I’ve only listened to it a few times and is sounds really good; let me know if you’re interested in a more detailed report, and perhaps I’ll post a more detailed report.

Photocredit: The Drew, (c) 2008.

Footnotes:

1. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten the name of his band. Sorry, guy. [back]
2. The CBC have no taste: just look at what they did with This is Wonderland shortly afterward – this is why I cancelled cable.  But I digress. [back]
3. Stephen McBean’s vocals are pure sex. [back]
4. I’m just one of those people, if I like it, I’ll support if financially. Seems reasonable to me – I don’t quite understand the logic behind what the media is now calling “free-tards”. [back]

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