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Black Mountain.
 According to Black Mountain's Stephen McBean, Canadian music is really coming into its own internationally at the moment. "There are lots of great people doing stuff right now," says the front man of the Vancouver quintet. "Tons of people are showing up for local live music now. We went through a pretty sparse period for a while, but now it's like there are shows all the time. There are a good handful of bands that are really great, that are on their way to doing well."
The Black Mountain story is a tangled web. The members have played together in the past under a variety of names, Jerk With A Bomb being the first incarnation. Even now, pretty much the same band is also playing as The Pink Mountaintops, and they've recently christened themselves the Black Mountain Army. In the meantime, though, Black Mountain is the main focus of the collective, and is currently touring North America, and hopes to join Xiu Xiu on their upcoming Australian tour.
"Some of the people in Black Mountain have played together for a bunch of years," explains McBean. "We've all been friends for a long time. It just so happened that a year ago, last January, I started playing with Matt [Camirand] and Jeremy [Schmidt] joined right after that, then we played our first show as Black Mountain. And Pink Mountaintops is like, not really my solo thing, but it's kinda just my thing, and there's basically about ten different people that I play with at different times whenever people have time. It also includes most of the members of Black Mountain," he admits.
It seems there was little separating the two projects initially. "There's more definition now. There's both the Black Mountain and Pink Mountaintop albums now. Before those records were made it was just a bunch of songs, but the bands didn't technically exist yet. I just had tapes full of songs. There are a few songs that could have gone either way, but now it's pretty conscious where things are going to pop up."
Trying to define the Black Mountain sound, McBean explains, "Some of the songs were Jerk With A Bomb songs that we never recorded but we were playing live. It kinda just evolved, because at first we were a two piece, then we became a three piece, then a four piece. And just as more members came in the sound kept evolving, whereas Jerk With A Bomb was pretty low key."
Black Mountain's eponymous debut is a nod to the classics of rock, such as 'Sabbath, 'Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones. Like many of those classic records there are only eight tracks, carefully sequenced for maximum effect; McBean is vocal in his disapproval of records that take up 80 minutes on a CD simply because the room is there.
It's hard to ignore the band's classic rock influence; I point out that songs like Don't Run Our Hearts Around sound particularly Sabbath-y. "People always mention 'Sabbath. I don't know if that has to do with the term Black in the names; in teenage years I listened to tons of 'Sabbath, but it's not like we sit around listening to a lot of 'Sabbath now!" he laughs. "But yeah, I can see it in that song and in a couple of other parts."
However, the band has other influences. "Everyone's got their thing," he says. "Like Jeremy [Schmidt] who plays the keyboards: he's got his own solo band, Sinoia Caves, and his bedroom is basically full of old analog synths and organs and whatnot. He's been doing that kinda thing since the early 'nineties. Most of us love a lot of the Krautrock stuff, like Can, and Faust, and Amon Daal. And the greats, like Pink Floyd, and The 'Stones. I love The 'Stones...
"You can go through different eras of records. For a while I was into their early R&B records, which were mostly covers with maybe one or two originals on them. Then there's their disco era. But they put out lots of great records. I'd rather someone say we sound like The Rolling Stones than Ashlee Simpson," he says with a chuckle. "I think they were one of the greatest rock n' roll bands that ever existed. Especially as far as a body of work. I mean most bands have like one or two good records. And they've got at least ten years of great records."
Eddie Chan
 | 'Black Mountain' is out now through Low Transit Industries. |
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