Black Mountain

Black Mountain's return to Rome is a curiosity worth noting.

Having reached their third album and confirmed - indeed improved upon - the promise of their first two works, the Canadian band is now firmly established among the elite of artists writing the history of rock music in the new millennium.

Their psychedelic hard rock, with strong folk roots, is winning over an ever-growing following that goes well beyond nostalgics of certain 70's vibes, so much so that on a pleasant early-October evening the Circolo degli Artisti draws a remarkable turnout.

Opening the evening are London's Goldheart Assembly, flawless in performing the polished alt-pop found on their debut "Wolves And Thieves".

Next up are Night Terrors, from Melbourne, Australia, purveyors of an aggressive, highly experimental synth-rock tinged with shoegaze despite the absence of guitars (it's two keyboards that build all the necessary layers), with leader Miles Brown taking center stage wielding a heavily distorted bass and a futuristic theremin.

Black Mountain don't disappoint expectations, displaying unexpected humility (they set up and break down their own gear on stage themselves) and generosity (staying to meet fans at length right after the show ends).

In between there's an hour and a half of majestic music, at times roaring, at times tender, with the spotlight on Stephen McBean, a superb guitarist with undisguised Zeppelin/Sabbath leanings, and singer Amber Webber, somewhat shy in her stage manner, but perfectly complementary to McBean in their vocal interplay.

Hardly mere supporting players are the hyper-vintage keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt, the versatile bassist Matt Camirand, and the fierce drummer Josh Wells, all busy with significant side projects whenever Black Mountain leaves them free time, to the point that the band amounts to a sort of supergroup.

McBean leads the Vancouver quintet through a flawless show that, besides offering a taste of the excellent material on the recent "Wilderness Heart", digs up the two most striking tracks from their self-titled debut ("Don't Run Our Hearts Around" and "Druganaut", which close out the first part of the show and the encore respectively), as well as the best of "In The Future", with the crowd clearly relishing above all the formidable pairing of "Wucan" and "Tyrants", which alone would be worth the price of admission.

Very 70s atmospheres, sumptuous guitar walls, blood-soaked riffs, but also sublime psychedelia, and the acoustic crystalware of "Buried By The Blues" and "Stay Free".

What Black Mountain deliver is a genuine greatest hits set, drawing on the best of their catalogue without a single dip in quality.

Among the tracks from "In The Future", besides those already mentioned, they dig up the unmatched grandeur of "Queens Will Play" (in which Webber comes across as a latter-day Grace Slick), the breathless rush of "Evil Ways", the pop curves of "Angel" and the anthem "Stormy High".

Among the new songs, well-deserved space goes to the Sabbath-like "Let Spirits Ride" and "Wilderness Heart" (though it's placed at the start of the set, with the band still searching for the right balance between the sounds), the Zeppelin-esque "Roller Coaster" and the irresistible "Old Fangs". 

They may well be derivative, but no one today pays homage to these sounds as well as they do, offering a fine rebuttal to anyone who claims rock has nothing left to say.

It's clear we're in the minefield of wild citationism, but tonight Black Mountain emerge as glorious victors, dressing their classic hard-rock, psych and acoustic folk touchstones in an unheard-of modernity, spicing it all with an underlying organic quality that makes the show (and, for that matter, their studio work too) truly superb.

What comes through is a sincere emulation of a sound and attitude typical of 70s rock, but turned into performances that have no intention of marrying either the past or the present, but rather of generating it anew, with the aim of forging a new musical path — an intent further reinforced by the maze of side projects the individual musicians pursue (from the lysergic psychedelia of McBean's Pink Mountaintops, to the cosmic-pop of Wells and Webber's Lightning Dust, from the country-folk of Camirand's Blood Meridian to the instrumental work of Schmidt, hidden under the alias Sinoia Caves).

So the idea isn't to plunder or slavishly recreate the atmospheres of the past, but to lay the groundwork for a new discourse that seeks to reclaim only the primordial approach of that attitude.

Records like "Wilderness Heart" and shows like this one keep giving meaning to our obscure work as humble scribes of the electric dream.

Superb champions of hard-rock's resurrection, Black Mountain have made their influences so personal that today they sound like no other band on the planet, becoming themselves the new benchmark for anyone who from now on intends to emulate this sound.

Recommended to anyone who finds Battles or Pinback (just naming two at random, but there are dozens more) too polished to be credible, and to anyone whose last thrill came from an album like Songs Of The Deaf by Queens Of The Stone Age.

If this is the future, let's all dream of long hair and a return to the hippy imagery!

Ride the wave of great music

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