Tuesday 14 September 2010



QBiM SPiNS: Black Mountain Wilderness Heart

Does the music inside match the year's best album art?

I always get a chuckle out of the name of Black Mountain‘s last record, In The Future.  It’s a disc that sounded to me like archeologists had unearthed it from a time capsule that was buried sometime in the early 70s, a document of what its authors imagined 2008 would sound like.  When you think about it, that’s no small feat: it’s a modern record that sounds like 30-year old classic rock looking forward 30 years. It was an apocalyptic heavy metal music time machine.

I didn’t care for it all that much.  It had its moments–I appreciated the craftsmanship of the record, and “Tyrants” was a cool song–but the mix of heavy metal riffing and blissed out stoner rock that has become Black Mountain’s signature sound really didn’t do anything for me as a whole. What it did do is open the door for me to explore McBean’s other artistic outlet, Pink Mountaintops.  Their 2009 record Outside Love was one of my favourites of the year.  Also from 2009, Amber Webber and Joshua Wells, recording together as Lightning Dust, released Infinite Light, a sparkling gem of a record that was high on my list, too.  So with the knowledge of how much I loved those two records, I approach the new Black Mountain record Wilderness Heart with an open mind and a willingness to get down and dirty with their deep and dark, sometimes cavernous and ominous heavy jams.

Turns out it’s not down I’d be travelling but up. The sprawling jams get reined in, the songs get right to the point, and the overall effect is that Black Mountain are aiming high.  Wilderness Heart is not “Black Mountain-lite” so much as “Black Mountain-light”. The menacing keyboard riff of “Old Fangs” morphs into a thruster blast that lifts the song into the stratosphere and builds momentum for the whole album.  The punk-meets-speed-metal riffing of “Let Spirits Ride” further buoys the record onward and upwards, reaching a pinnacle from which it begins it’s slow and steady descent.

“Buried By The Blues” is four minutes of folk-infused balladry where McBean and Webber sing “Against the night/You will rise and set your body free,” in their trademark harmonies, underpinned by a subtle string accompaniment. From here on in, Wilderness Heart begins a slow, majestic deceleration that brings the record a sense of balance.  Some might say it’s a disappointing finale, but I find it to be a post-coital cuddle after a sweaty and passionate love making session with a sense of anticipation that the night isn’t over just yet.

Wilderness Heart may be the album on which Black Mountain make a play for wider mass appeal than they may have previously courted.  If you look back on their progression as musicians and songwriters–not just in Black Mountain but all the other projects they’ve been involved in–Wilderness Heart is less anomaly and more evolution.  It is decidedly low on the free-form psychedelics that marked their first two records, which may be a result of having outside producers at the helm for the first time, and it comes across as a much neater package than In The Future may have (again, most likely down to producers Randall Dunn, and D. Sardy), but change like this isn’t a bad thing. Webber croons “Take me to the sweet country mountain/Release me from the heart of this storm” on the album’s title track, nicely summing up Wilderness Heart’s place in the Black Mountain catalogue:  the winds of change are upon them.

Wilderness Heart is released today on Outside Music.

MP3: Black Mountain “The Hair Song”
Video: Black Mountain “Old Fangs”
Myspace: Black Mountain
Facebook: Black Mountain
Twitter: Black Mountain





by J. Di Gioia | Comments Off

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