Righteous New Gathering (Black Mountain, Mercury Lounge)

What would happen if the Festival Express turned into the Crazy Train?

Mixing hippie-dippie psychedelia with metal isn’t anything new – Hendrix, hello – but Black Mountain manages to make it feel both old and surprising.  A bit like a phone call from a distant relative you’d never met and had thought dead.  

But, like, totally fun!  Um.

Sorry, still sorting myself out, here... And the band took a little while to sort themselves out, last night.  The Vancouver five-piece took the stage under various stages of influence, and without their own instruments: their gear had been lifted earlier, the fourth group in the last few weeks to get robbed (As if the band’s sixties’ sound-worship didn’t already put them in the company of the Brian Jonestown Massacre...).  “Hey, thanks,” the bassist called out to whomever lent their instrument to him, “It’s pink!”  “We’re all pink on the inside,” someone shouted back. 

Vocalist Amber Webber called through the mic for Jäger shots; here’s hoping there’s nothing more to that stomach bulge than Twinkies n’ beer.

At first impression, there’s no reason why this band shouldn’t be re-monikered “Bongwater:”  Vocalist/guitarist Stephen McBean wears a beard he’s been working on since birth, Webber managed a balance of sunflower-next-door and Joplinesque excess, the rest of the band sported lazy eyelids and fourth-dimension non-sequiturs.  The crowd members that crowded the front of the stage may have been touring with the group; one had grabbed a tambourine at the end of the previous band’s set, and pounded enthusiastically (and competently) throughout the first half of this one.  They were certainly more animated than the rest of the room’s New Yorkers.

And the tunes were jammy, spacey things, the male-female vocals invitingly burbling on about... oh, I don’t know, stuff.  Until.  Riffage would take over, rumbling out from under each song’s hempy poncho, rawking out most royally.  The love-in up front morphed to mosh pit, long hair became big hair.

The fine line that separates psychedelia from metal is really an invisible one:  All of it’s excess... it’s just a matter of where you put your oomph.  And Black Mountain – too perfectly named, it turns out, like Ozzy and friends co-opted Leslie West’s old stomping ground – spreads its oomph around, man.  One of the best numbers was a new one, “Queens Will Play” (“Play what?!” someone in the crowd screamed), its swampy riff creeping up into a big Man-Thingish roar.

The shock of that transition is good for several songs... but eventually the usual masturbatory chafing kicks in.  I don’t have the patience for this stuff, anymore:  I’m older, I’m sober, and the effort:payback ratio has a low rate of return.  They were fun (definitely better live than the two MP3s at their label’s site), the crowd (at least up at the front – as the show stretched on past midnight, the back of the sold out room had noticeably thinned out) was having fun, but you really have to be properly stoned to be fascinated by the fact that enough is enough is enough is enough.

At the end of their set, they invited all the members of the opening bands up, along with several members of the crowd for one last communal bang-off.  It was amusing to watch a drummer squeeze behind a half-dismantled set that had been dragged off to the side, and to see just how many folks you can fit on the stage at the Mercury Lounge.

I’m starting to believe Canadians are agoraphobic.  Or, perhaps, used to huddling together for warmth.  I love Broken Social Scene and all, but why do you need an entire town’s worth of people up there?  Whatever.  At long last, band members exited the stage – perhaps the Fire Marshall gave a warning, or Glee Club hit its quorum, or somesuch.  They left, of course, one-by-one, finally leaving that guest drummer in the corner to bang away at his tambourine all by his lonesome. 

I think he might have been stuck.

*

The climax – with all those folks on stage at once – might have worked better had the previous band, Blood Meridian, not done exactly the same thing.  The band – which shares members with Black Mountain (whose frontman also has a band called “Pink Mountaintops”) is just like every bar band, ever.  Their best song was a cover of Dead Moon’s “I Hate the Blues.”

tags: indie music  black mountain  concert reviews  

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