THE OUTER LIMITS
Canadian psych rockers Black Mountain love concept albums, Yes and Storm Thorgerson. But are they prog? We find out…
Nothing screams prog like a great concept album. Black Mountain’s approach is a little different, however. Rather than weighty narratives or complex song cycles, the Canadian space rockers’ latest album is a fast-moving hymn to the exhilarating freedom of the open road. Named after a vintage 80s muscle car, Destroyer came about after singer/guitarist Stephen McBean got a driving licence.
“It definitely had a fair amount of influence on the songs and the recording,” says the LA-based McBean, who finally took to the wheel a couple of years ago, aged 48. “When you’re making records there are different ways of taking yourself out of the process and analysing the songs. I used to do things like sit on a park bench, get really stoned and listen to a Walkman. But for this one it was a case of getting into the car, putting in a rough mix and driving around to see how it sounded. It led to me rediscovering a lot of music, rekindling my love for things like classic rock and metal.”
Destroyer is a tearaway, for sure. There are tankfuls of wild biker rock and stoner metal, and choking riffs that burn like wheels on tarmac. But the album has way more to it than simply a need for speed. There is the kind of tetchy psychedelia and discursive prog folk that have been Black Mountain trademarks since the band began in 2004. Synths bubble, time signatures shift. There are nods to Hawkwind, Peter Hammill and – most explicitly – Yes, on Closer To The Edge.
Above all, there’s a liberating sense of exploration and wonder. “I’ve always bounced all over the place, trying to dig into different things,” McBean explains. “It could be listening to early Cure or Nico, Slayer or Fairport Convention. That’s the beauty of music. I can never quite say what form a Black Mountain record might take, because we have a pretty wide scope. It could be a synth record, it could be folk, it could be heavy metal. And something will put the Black Mountain stamp on it when it feels right. There’s definitely something ominous and epic about our records.”
While it may be pushing it to call Black Mountain a prog band, many of the requisite elements are in place. Fluid tempos aside, you’ll find extended jams, cosmic musings, bold experiments and sci-fi songtitles. The band’s album covers, designed by keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt, echo the striking visuals of the 70s. The sleeve of 2008’s In The Future, Black Mountain’s second longplayer, was directly inspired by the work of Storm Thorgerson, co-founder of art collective Hipgnosis. “Hipgnosis is one of Jeremy’s big influences,” says McBean. “There’s definitely an epic quality to those pieces, and a vagueness and mysteriousness – sometimes taking the mundane and mixing it up. That era is definitely a big influence on the art and is a very important part of any Black Mountain record as a whole.”
The loose motoring theme of Destroyer serves as a link to McBean’s first musical experiences back home in Canada. “I discovered music, essentially, by sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car in the heyday of FM radio,” he says. “My mum would go grocery shopping and I’d just stay in the parking lot and listen to the radio. For me, discovering music was pretty much an escape from school and the whole pressures of growing up.”
ONE OF MY FRIENDS GAVE ME THE WALL WHEN IT CAME OUT. I WAS ALREADY FAMILIAR WITH MONEY AND A LOT OF THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, WHICH WAS ALL OVER FM RADIO, SO THERE WAS DEFINITELY A LOT OF PROG THAT ENTERED MY CONSCIOUSNESS BACK THEN.
The young McBean initially savoured the sounds of classic rock, before developing more eclectic tastes: “One of my next loves after Kiss – and probably because I was living in Ontario – was Rush. It was in the heyday of Hemispheres and A Farewell To Kings, so I was hearing that stuff when I was probably about eight or nine. Then one of my friends gave me [Pink Floyd’s] The Wall when it came out. I was already familiar with Money and a lot of The Dark Side Of The Moon, which was all over FM radio, so there was definitely a lot of prog that entered my consciousness back then.”
He began on the thriving hardcore punk scene in Victoria, on the southern edge of Vancouver Island. Taking their name from a mental ward in an episode of Woody Woodpecker, McBean formed Jerk Ward in 1981. The band eventually evolved into Mission Of Christ, after which he relocated to Vancouver to try his luck with another outfit, Gus. Issued in 1995, the title of their sole album couldn’t have been more prog: The Progressive Science Of Breeding Idiots For A Dumber Society.
McBean believes that his particular grounding in punk shaped his outlier worldview. “Growing up on an island in my teenage years, the punk and metal scenes were very diverse,” he recalls. “NoMeansNo were the godfathers of that scene, so there were a lot of bands from Victoria who did really weird, angular time-signature punk. Or just had a slightly skewed sense of humour, whether it was politically or personally. Maybe it was because they were outside of the big city influence.”
This, in turn, led to McBean going through what he calls a “post-punk prog phase.” He encountered the sounds of Magma, Captain Beefheart and Peter Gabriel. Then he found a whole new library of possibilities in the underground music that emerged from early-70s Germany: “I’d heard the obvious ones like Kraftwerk, but I remember hearing Vitamin C by Can in my late 20s. It was that thing where I’d remembered hearing that song as a teenager round at somebody’s house. The same goes with stuff like Brian Eno’s Needle In The Camel’s Eye. Those memories are all tied in, so a lot of those songs are subliminally imprinted on my mind.”
Another key influence came from further afield. “In my early 20s the Boredoms came out and then there was an explosion of Japanese freak-rock that led back to some pretty strange stuff,” he says. Perhaps none stranger than Flower Travellin’ Band, the legendary prog psych ensemble who delivered cult 70s classics like Satori and Made In Japan. Odder still, their most lucrative international market proved to be Canada. The band’s impact on Black Mountain can be heard, most strikingly, on In The Future’s epic Tyrants.
Black Mountain began as a song. Then fronting Jerk With A Bomb, alongside drummer Joshua Wells, it was one of a number of demos that McBean laid down in 2003. By 2004, they’d begun using the name on stage and had expanded to a quintet. One of their signature pieces was Bright Lights, a mammoth jam that eventually made its studio bow on In The Future. In many ways, it came to represent the Black Mountain aesthetic – an intoxicating mixture of disciplined melody and anything-goes noise.
“The first half of that song was always pretty structured, but the second half really came out of playing it live a lot and striking out,” McBean offers. “I was obsessed with trying to find out how to stretch out songs at that time. When things are rolling and you’re in tune with the audience, you can really drift in and out of time.
It’s fun and perhaps also a little tonguein-cheek in the sheer pompousness of having an 18-minute song. There’s a lot of humour in Black Mountain. It may be masked in dour seriousness, but it’s definitely there.”
Indeed. Even at their most streamlined, charging forward in
I’VE ALWAYS BOUNCED ALL OVER THE PLACE, TRYING TO DIG INTO DIFFERENT THINGS. IT COULD BE LISTENING TO EARLY CURE OR NICO, SLAYER OR FAIRPORT CONVENTION. THAT’S THE
BEAUTY OF MUSIC.
a rush of head-nodding grooves, Black Mountain are conscious of avoiding any rock’n’roll stereotypes. “It’s nice to dabble close to the clichés though,” laughs McBean. “The other day I was rediscovering Peter Hammill’s divorce record, Over [1977]. It’s tragically horrendous in its way, but at the same time it’s so great. So we’re definitely skirting along the lines of bad taste or pompousness. Calling the new record Destroyer was definitely a part of that. Jeremy and I were riffing one-word titles back and forth via text messages. There were hundreds – some that were pretty good and some that were downright awful – but we knew the feeling we wanted. There were ones that were so close, like ‘Mutilator’ or ‘Re-animator’, then ‘Destroyer’ popped its head. It was so obvious and kind of arrogant, but we both agreed it was too good not to use. We thought that some people would get a laugh out of it, while others would be like, ‘What? You can’t use the same name as the most famous Kiss record!’”
McBean doesn’t enjoy being idle. Aside from the five studio albums with Black Mountain, he’s recorded another four as Pink Mountaintops, a repository for experimental pop and electro-rock, aided (at one time or another) by various guests from bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and The Black Angels. In 2014, he unveiled a hardcore metal project, Obliterations. Schmidt, meanwhile, recently provided the soundtrack to ‘lost’ 80s sci-fi film Beyond The Black Rainbow, under his alias as Sinoia Caves. Schmidt’s score is evidence of more prog-related inspiration, reaching back into the cosmic synthscapes of Tangerine Dream, John Carpenter and Wendy Carlos.
The duo’s return to Black Mountain coincided with a shake-up in band personnel prior to Destroyer. Following the release of its predecessor, 2016’s IV, longtime members Joshua Wells and Amber Webber chose to concentrate on their side project, Lightning Dust. The new Black Mountain line-up now includes various associates of Flaming Lips, Oneida and Sleepy Sun. The result, says McBean, is that the band feel like it’s now come full circle.
“Destroyer was made in a similar way to the first Black Mountain record, in that the band was formed as the record was being made,” he states. “After Joshua and Amber left, there was a brief moment of sadness. Jeremy and I had a quick huddle and decided that neither of us wanted to pack it in. The journey of actually continuing was a lot more difficult, but we figured that the best way to do it was to start making a record and not plan whether it would be Black Mountain or Pink Mountaintops or something new.
So we invited friends over and jammed some new songs. Some of the stuff came out a little heavier or stranger and it became pretty obvious, the more it went on, that this was going to be a new Black Mountain record. We weren’t trying to mimic the old line-up. This band will always be about creating something different. That’s what makes it interesting.”
Destroyer is out now via Dine Alone. See www.blackmountainarmy.com for more information.