Plumbiferous Media

Van­cou­ver prog-rock band Black Moun­tain, founded in 2004, released their third LP, Wilder­ness Heart, on the 14th. Wilder­ness Heart is a bit of a depar­ture from Black Mountain’s nor­mal style, but the band man­ages the shift well. And so, on Wilder­ness Heart, Black Moun­tain con­tin­ues to develop (and change) their indie-psych musi­cal com­bi­na­tion in a way that is, while cer­tainly dif­fer­ent from their efforts on 2008’s In the Future, quite interesting.

Wilder­ness Heart is, for bet­ter or worse, an almost entirely new sound for Black Moun­tain. The gen­eral instru­men­ta­tion remains fairly sim­i­lar (quite stan­dard), but the style has shifted dras­ti­cally. Much more of a rock album than the ambi­ent, imag­i­na­tive, and at times majes­tic In the Future, Black Moun­tain has effec­tively tossed out all that was good about In the Future for Wilder­ness Heart. But Wilder­ness Heart really is a good album. The instru­men­tals are con­stantly engag­ing, excit­ing, and still able to evoke pow­er­ful images, most notably on the very aptly named “Roller Coaster.”

Addi­tion­ally, while clearly a prog-rock band, Black Moun­tain doesn’t really sound like many other pro­gres­sive bands. Wilder­ness Heart inter­prets prog as rock, but with sig­nif­i­cantly more instru­men­tal imagery, rather than aim­ing for expan­sive and often repet­i­tive rock, or sim­ply loud rock, as prog bands are prone to do more often than not. And repet­i­tive is really the last word one would use to describe Wilder­ness Heart. No track lasts longer than it should, and every track dis­plays an entirely new sound, almost to the point of hav­ing some­what dis­con­nected tracks.

Front­man Stephen McBean shares vocals on Wilder­ness Heart with Amber Web­ber (as with Black Mountain’s ear­lier work). McBean and Webber’s voices gen­er­ally work together quite well, whether they’re shar­ing a melody or sim­ply in con­trast to each other across sec­tions of a track. How­ever, Black Mountain’s slight shift of style (less ambi­ent, more rock) removes some of the vocal­ists’ pres­ence, as they are forced to com­pete with some­what harsher (and cer­tainly louder) instru­men­tals. This doesn’t do a great deal of dam­age to Wilder­ness Heart’s vocals, espe­cially across the whole album. How­ever, it does def­i­nitely decrease their impor­tance some­what, which, as they’re among the bet­ter ele­ments of Wilder­ness Heart, is prob­a­bly ill-advised.

The lyrics of Wilder­ness Heart don’t always make sense, but they do gen­er­ally fit the music. Slightly abstract metaphor­i­cal lines such as “Let the sky be lit­tered with radi­ant hearts / Wait­ing to guide you back home” are a fairly obvi­ous match to Black Mountain’s psych/prog sound. On the whole, how­ever, they don’t seem to mean all that much. That’s not so much of a sur­prise given that Wilder­ness Heart focuses more on imagery than mean­ing - but some mean­ing would improve the album.

Wilder­ness Heart is def­i­nitely not a per­fect album. As an album that really does get bet­ter when it gets louder, there are far too many near-painfully slow tracks. That, among other smaller prob­lems, does bog the album down quite a bit. But even still, there’s a lot to Wilder­ness Heart. Black Moun­tain deserves quite a bit of credit for chang­ing sounds so abruptly and not com­pletely going off the rails, both vocal­ists, how­ever bogged down they may be, exe­cuted their parts quite suc­cess­fully, and Wilder­ness Heart really is a very engag­ing album with a very large amount of con­tent. It will cer­tainly upset some and please oth­ers, but Wilder­ness Heart is undoubt­edly a success.

This post is tagged 70-79, Black Mountain