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With the self titled debut album of Canadian art collective Black Mountain, City Slang delivers one of the most extraordinary, complex and adorable records this year. Too pop for Prog too advanced for Rock and full of greatly rewarding music from a band that sounds like if The Blue Cheer had lived in Düsseldorf in 1971... totally over the top amazing, totally down to earth. and boy do they know how to use texture... Musical comparisons aside, the Black Mountain full-length is one part protest song, one part pop-cultural commentary, and one part sick-groove-rock casserole peppered with mesmerizing ballads and intoxicating ditties. "Modern Music" is the lead-off hitter and counts its way to the imposing and riff-rife "Don't Run Our Hearts Around". Immediately thereafter, the sludge-rock masterpiece "Druganaut" establishes the fecund heart and tone of the record. And just when you think that things can't get any better, the songs "No Hits" and "Heart of Snow" are injected into your consciousness, clearly demonstrating that this band has no creative bounds. Black Mountain, the front-line soldiers for the Black Mountain Army, an arts collective from Vancouver, write, perform and record music that speaks (and sings) to this realization: that solutions are rarely simple, that the world is as complex as it is ambiguous, and that music sprinkled with an inoculating dose of madness may well be the Pied Piper that takes us all back into the primordial mountain, where our hearts can be made steady and our minds can be set free. They feel that their art and their music and the problems of the real world, which they experience daily in their working life, cannot be made distinct from one another. If "the personal is political" then, regardless of the level of their lyrical or visual specificity, art and music are always political. The Black Mountain record demonstrates this with flying colors. The music contained therein contributes to a belief that is an essential first step in making the world a less crazy place: madness is not a contagion that can be simply amputated. Madness is an intrinsic part of all of us, an indelible part of the fiber of our being. Apart from that, four of the five members of Black Mountain work as mental health care workers in Vancouver's Downtown East Side. They are on the front-lines of a raging drug epidemic. |
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