Categories : Hard Rock + Metal, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 2/5 Reviewer: Andre Guimond |
It would be pretty hard to blame Black Mountain for the short-lived Wolfmother and Priestess-fueled psych-metal craze of 2006. Sure, they hit the scene first in 2005 with their well-received eponymous debut, but each group was simply referencing (or aping) the same 70’s material (Zeppelin, Sabbath, etc). BM didn’t hit it big with a ‘Talk to Her’ or ‘Mother,’ so their album was less contrived and obvious than their contemporaries. Unfortunately, instead of further setting themselves apart from jock-worshipped acts, In the Future finds Stephen McBean’s ragtag group chasing a big, strained and awkwardly serious sound that neither campus radio listeners nor former fans will find easy to digest.
From the beginning, In the Future is both maddeningly ambiguous and tryingly obvious. The pounding riff that leads off opener ‘Stormy High’ makes things pretty clear: okay, this is going to be a heavy album, we get it. (Ace Frehley might have made a few litigious calls if he’s heard the track, too.) At the same time, it’s hard to tell if the song is simply about a bad high or if there’s some deeper message touching on corrupted power. Continuing the obvious trend, stadium-sized guitars and drums kick in immediately on ‘Tyrants,’ a stiffly solemn 8-minute anti-war allegory that would have been a lot more effective had it held back on the army funeral drumming. A war song can be just that without war sounds.
Strangely, Black Mountain also makes a case against their own new massive sound with toned-down, subtle (and much shorter) pieces like ‘Wild Wind’ and the gorgeous ‘Night Walks,’ which proves that Amber Webber sounds a hell of a lot better when she’s not trying to channel Grace Slick (see ‘Queens Will Play’). To be fair to the big songs, though, how often have we come into contact with fantasy-inspired epic metal lyrical stories in relatively mainstream music in the last couple of years? Maybe it’s all just too foreign being 30 years removed, or maybe it really helps to have already had a midlife crisis and grown up on 2112 to get it.
