In spite of ‘Spinal Tap’, Tommy Lee and Ted Nugent there are employees in the rock ’n’ roll sector who favour Maracana-sized riffs and yet don’t conform to beer sozzled, wee-snorting, cock-in-sock type. Step forward Black Mountain, a band of Canucks who display a large, overheated brain in their heads down gnarliness and whose vision of apocalypse holds the attention with an iron grip.
Clearly big fans of torchbearers Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Neil Young, Black Mountain rock hard and groove sveltely. But immediately into their second psychedelic outing, any suspicions of rehashery or AOR ordinariness are snuffed out by a band enlightening us to where, as everything stands, we’re all heading. By the bloodshed and clouds of fire that litter ‘In The Future’, it’s going to be like Ragnarok but with more drugs.
Criticisms of worthiness will be slung Black Mountain’s way, as with lots of ‘fuck The Man!’ records, but this is edge of the seat stuff, oozing with terrifying displeasure and nightmare reality. If any band should have a go at painting these horrors, it’s one whose members are informed by their extra-curricular employment as mental health workers and drug counsellors.
There’s not much pre-catastrophe sunshine in their music, either. Doomy, Lynch-like synths, which reveal a fondness for Mellotron-armed prog and Krautrock bands, soundtrack our ominous march; ‘Tyrants’ is all low-slung, war rally melodrama; and the epic ‘Bright Lights’ – monstrous, riffing gives way to celestial ambience – runs Floyd close for best disturbing dreamscape. Their pleas for change, ‘Stay Free’ and ‘Evil Ways’, aside, this is the stairway to heaven collapsing.
