“One day, you’re like, ‘This is bullshit. I’ve had it
up to here with this fucking shit music,'” reflects Black Mountain
drummer Joshua Wells on the decision to begin his band’s debut album
with an indictment against all contemporary music. “Modern
Music”—from the Vancouver, BC, act’s 2005 self-titled
LP—mocked pop with the nasal chorus “Oh, we can’t stand/all your
modern music.” But as the full-length unfolds into an easy balance of
new-weird indie rock and jam-band psychedelia, you would be correct to
assume the intro is mostly just talk. “Then the next day, you’re like,
‘Oh, I guess it’s not all bad,'” says Wells with a chuckle.
Listeners might be less forgiving if Black Mountain had instead
opened their behemoth follow-up, In the Future, with these
lyrics. The epic, indulgent recording—which fellow Mercury contributor Andrew R. Tonry called “[mostly] a big, clunky
mess”—lobs ahead like a wobbly, conceptual 8-track tape from the
’70s. Styx’s The Grand Illusion comes to mind, itself a guilty
hodgepodge of five-piece feel-good and hard-rock bombast. “Tyrants”
lifts the headbanging fifths of obsessively anachronistic locals Danava
before channeling a bounty off Led Zeppelin IV: co-ed quiver,
ghost town pickin’, rawk payoff, the works (of a satisfying KGON
playlist).
Yet if In the Future weren’t wobbly, it couldn’t feature the
band’s treasurable Mellotron keyboard. Revered for its scratchy
orchestral sounds—and reviled by prog-rockers who toured with the
fragile beasts in the ’70s—the tape-based instrument is key to
the band’s analog aesthetic. And before German outfit Manikin
Electronic released a digital Mellotron (the “Memotron”), Black
Mountain weren’t replicating this core component onstage. Wells says
their show is now true to the album, “at about one-tenth of the
weight.” Just don’t expect modern music.
“When it comes right down to it, good music just comes about by
falling in upon itself,” he says. “We’re not trying to reinvent rock
‘n’ roll or anything; we just want to make music that makes us feel
good.”