Black Mountain’s debut ring true a decade later
When we say that Black Mountain’s debut is a perfect summer album, please understand this Vancouver space-boogie concoction was the soundtrack to our perfect summer. We were young. We were angry. We were getting really good weed. Like, really, really good weed. We were broke as hell, but we were spent our nights restoring an antebellum church, turning it into a record store that would prove too weird to survive. We were blissfully oblivious to the coming collapse of the music industry. We would have barbecues at our bandmate’s side project’s practice space every Sunday, rocking to Stephen McBean’s groovy riffs and singing along with Amber Webber’s cosmic voicings until the early hours of the morning.
And then, at the end of the summer, right as the ill-fated record store was about to open its doors, the whole gang took a five-hour drive to see Black Mountain play one of the most transcendent sets of rock ‘n’ roll we’ve ever seen. Perfect. Fucking. Summer. Ten years on, as our doughy gut squishes out of the concert tee we bought 10 years and 10 billion cheeseburgers ago, Black Mountain is still perfect. From the opening skronk-pop of “Modern Music” to the scuzz-fuzz sex-throb of “Druganaut” (found here in a gloriously egregious eight-minute extended version), Black Mountain is a flawless collection of shimmering pop conjured from deep, dank psych grooves.
—Sean L. Maloney
