BLACK MOUNTAIN - Wilderness Heart
Monday, September 27, 2010 at 04:00PM 
I still remember first hearing about Stephen McBean's early project, the oddball indie outfit Jerk With A Bomb, from a friend. It's some decent stuff, but in no way did it hint on the grand scope of music this man had the potential to unleash on the world in the coming decade. Since then, between Black Mountain and his always evolving "solo" project, Pink Mountaintops, McBean has taken on Spector pop ballads, minimal electro bedroom excursions and hairy psych freakouts, and mastered them all. But there's no question that it's the Sabbath-meets-"Low Rider" stoner cool of Black Mountain breakthroughs like "Druganaut" and "Don't Run Our Hearts Around" that are his greatest claim to fame.
Black Mountain's second LP, In The Future, sought to push this style to the edge of its possible envelope—the result being an eight-minute single, "Tyrants", and the seventeen-minute "Bright Lights" (notable if only for the endless repetition of "Light Bright/Light Bright..." that no doubt had scores of high thirty-year-olds scouring their mom's closet in the vain hope of finding the namesake toy left over from their youth). It was a solid effort, but as an album it kind of lost itself in places.
Well, the band has definitely found itself again on Wilderness Heart, a pure distillation of all the things that make McBean's projects great—it swoons, it spaces out, and it rocks like a hurricane—and all within the confines of a far more succinct LP. "Old Fangs" and "Let Spirits Ride" (the latter containing a riff that actually sounds a lot like a sped-up take on Van Halen's "House of Pain"—just saying...) are head-banging bursts of hirsute fun. In other places, tracks like "Radiant Hearts" and "Rollercoaster" offer beautiful pedestals for the perfect pairing of McBean and Amber Webber's vocals. And all across the album, the band sounds capital 'A' amazing: locked and loaded with even more room than before for Jeremy Schmidt's killer synth and organ lines.
As with any album that seeks to truncate a band's sound, what it gains in brevity, it loses a little in blissed-out patience. And so Wilderness Heart has no slow-building stunner on par with their debut's "No Hits" or "Set Us Free". But it's a welcome shift all the same that the band wears well. Besides, with a career as varied as McBean's, there little doubt he'll find himself back in that trippy, kraut-y territory again soon enough.
Reader Comments (1)
Love this album but I think Let Spirits Ride sounds like Sabbath's Symptom of the Universe off Sabotage.