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Music

Black Mountain

BLACK MOUNTAIN with the BLACK ANGELS at the Phoenix (410 Sherbourne), Sunday (October 31), 7:30 pm. $20.50. HS, RT, SS, TM.


On a European tour in support of their divine new album, Wilderness Heart, Black Mountain are noticing something unusual going down. They pull into a city, say Hamburg or Brussels, only to find hordes of admiring fans waiting for them in the parking lot, Sharpies and vinyl albums extended toward the shaggy-haired psych rockers.

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That level of fandom is new to them. But if you’re picturing a cleavage-and-cutoffs scene out of Rock Of Love Bus, think again. The average Black Mountain devotee, it turns out, is male, middle-aged and balding – a record-collecting autograph hound eager to discuss the nuances of the Vancouver band’s bong-worthy balance of progressive rock density, breezy folk ‘tude and heavy metal riffage, all coated in vintage tones.

Except, that is, when said fan’s expressing outrage.

“A few people have been like, ‘The new album is garbage,'” drawls main man Stephen McBean over the phone from Amsterdam. “In Scandinavia, they’re very blunt in a definitely not Canadian way.”

He giggles impishly and adopts a Scandinavian accent: “‘I love the band, but that was not a good set.’ You get it a lot with the older dudes in their mid-50s and 60s. Sometimes they’re really offended if you switch things up.”

For album number three, released on Outside and Jagjaguwar, Black Mountain have indeed switched things up. Gone are the 17-minute trippy jams à la Bright Lights from 2008’s Polaris Prize-nominated In The Future. They’ve been replaced by relatively brisk and accessible tunes that surge with energy and obliquely speak to our alienation from the natural world. (The brilliant cover art features a toothy white shark hovering blimp-like above a thin line of trees, all reflected in the glass of an office building.)

Even if some old-school Scandinavians have complaints, the approach is paying off. In cities where they’d played to 100 people on their last tour, they’re now drawing 1,000-plus. The joyous McBean/Amber Webber duet The Hair Song has been holding steady atop the CBCR3 charts, while the video for Old Fangs, featuring witches and a 1972 Mustang, has over 83,000 YouTube views. Their Halloween show at the Phoenix – a double bill with the equally heavy Black Angels – is destined to be off the hook. (The whole band’s dressing up, and they want you to, too.)

There are a few reasons for the newfound brevity. Determined to make an album faster than they usually do, the five-piece – which also includes drummer Joshua Wells, bewitching co-vocalist Webber, keyboardist/cover-art-creator Jeremy Schmidt and bassist Matt Camirand – hunkered down in a Vancouver jam space every day for a month, rehearsing, writing, arranging and demo-ing.

“We wanted to avoid some of the pitfalls that come with stretching out a recording over too long a period,” says Wells from Brussels. “You can get frustrated and over-think things. Our headspace was, ‘Let’s spend as much time doing this as we usually do, but not spread it out over two years.’ It was four months of really hard work.”

Another big change-up: instead of producing and recording the album themselves, as they did with 2005’s Black Mountain and 2008’s In The Future, they enlisted two producers – Dave Sardy (Johnny Cash, LCD Soundsystem, Devo) and Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth). And instead of recording in Vancouver, they headed south to Seattle and L.A.

“We wanted to introduce a maverick element into the fold,” explains Schmidt, who’s behind the pulsating keyboard atmospherics so fundamental to the Black Mountain sound. “At this point, we know well enough how to make a Black Mountain record so it was important to try something different.

“We wanted to take all the elements of a sprawling song and condense them into a mini-epic. [The song] Wilderness Heart kind of moves that way. It has a galvanizingly heavy riff, but we didn’t want it to just be that. We wanted to balance that heaviosity with a subtly shifting polyphony as well.”

Yes, he actually said that. Heaviosity, indeed.

As for working with producers, the band admits it wasn’t easy. For example, Sardy responded to one demo by telling them that, while the song was strong, the chorus just wasn’t good enough. For other tunes, arrangements got changed in a way that left some members’ parts on the cutting room floor.

“We got pushed in a way that we’d never been pushed before, creatively,” says Wells. “It was a hard pill to swallow but also nice that someone had the guts to tell us what could be better. We’re all stubborn… and middle-aged.”

Keen listeners and long-time fans might also notice a change in McBean’s vocals, which usually reside on the mumbly, tossed-off end of the spectrum. On Wilderness Heart, the 40-year-old bearded guitarist/singer, who’s attained cult-hero status in certain circles and also leads the hypnotic Pink Mountaintops, seems to be pushing himself out of his shell, even becoming occasionally theatrical as he sings forebodingly about dead seasons, devil’s doors and nuclear suns.

“On the other records, we’d be doing the vocals alone in our basement, so to have someone there pushing you….” McBean trails off, something he does often. “And both those guys have worked with incredible bands. Dave Sardy worked on the Johnny Cash records, the Rolling Stones, some pretty legendary people. So when the tape’s rolling, you don’t want to choke. You kind of want to bring it.”

Once you know Black Mountain’s backstory, it easy to see why constant evolution is not just preferred but necessary to the band’s continued existence. In 2004, Black Mountain arose from the ashes of Jerk with a Bomb, a downtrodden, Smog-influenced alt rock band composed of McBean and Wells that had difficulty growing a fan base. Things came to a head during a long tour for their third and final album.

“We drove from Edmonton to play a free show in Winnipeg and two people showed up,” McBean recalls. “Then we drove all the way to Minneapolis and played New Band Night. Before us was a funk-metal band doing the Inspector Gadget theme, and it was like….”

He trails off, letting the image sink in. “It just felt like no one was listening, and that tour confirmed that no one was listening.”

During that trip, Wells and McBean, by then in their 30s, started talking about no longer playing music in a public way. No more records, no more live shows, just music for their own pleasure. On the drive home, McBean hit on the concept for Pink Mountaintops – an amorphous, anything-goes project that would have a rotating cast, including lots of lady singers, and allow the long-time friends to play loud again. (“I was a punk-metal kid,” says McBean, “and I was like, ‘I want to play my guitar loud again or do a solo.’ And Josh was like, ‘I don’t want to play with brushes any more!'”)

They came home and recorded a few quick-and-dirty tracks that drew the attention of Jagjaguwar. The Bloomington, Indiana, label also liked a few Jerk with a Bomb tracks the guys had recorded for a live CBC session. Not wanting to release two albums by two unknowns, they suggested McBean and Wells combine the projects. The first Black Mountain album, then, is essentially very early Pink Mountaintops plus a few Jerk with a Bomb tracks, including Druganaut, a Black Mountain crowd-pleaser.

“There was a real energy,” McBean says. “The fun was back. And there was also something refreshing about ditching the name Jerk with a Bomb, which I’d been dragging around since 95.”

Creative renewal is Black Mountain’s fuel. Every member has at least one side project. So if you ever question a new direction, sit tight and see what happens next.

“Who knows?” says McBean, with another impish laugh. “The next album might just be three long songs.”

Interview Clips

Keyboardist/cover-art-maker Jeremy Schmidt on the album’s biggest challenge:

Download associated audio clip.

Schmidt on his love of making album cover art:

Download associated audio clip.

Vocalist/guitarist Stephen McBean on the evolution of his lyrics:

Download associated audio clip.

Stephen McBean on what punk rock still means to him:

Download associated audio clip.

music@nowtoronto.com

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