live music review: black mountain, the corner hotel, feb 21 2011

After seeing Black Mountain perform at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne on February 21st, 2011, my friend, Calvin, summed them up perfectly:

‘One of the best bands I’ve never heard of.’

Despite garnering much attention within the psych rock genre and spawning a collective of artists in Vancouver, BC, appropriately named the Black Mountain Army, Black Mountain has somehow evaded truly mainstream success (much like most of their psych rock counterparts), despite the hideous amount of talent within the band.

The first thing I notice upon arrival to the Corner Hotel is that (again, like most of their psych rock counterparts) the audience they have drawn is predominantly male. There are a lot of dudes here, and moreover, there are a lot of tall dudes here, and I spend most of the evening seeing a whole lot of not a lot. But this is hardly a band that prides itself upon their theatrics, and apart from a few gracious ‘thank you’s to the support acts and the audience (one of which was met by the politest heckler in the world, yelling out ‘I’d like to thank you’), their interaction is pretty minimal, and when they do speak, they come off more like your dry sarcastic stoner friends than people whose vocation it is to entertain.

But entertain they do, and their stage presence is nonetheless impressive and effortless. Particularly noteworthy is that of vocalist, Amber Webber, whose timid speaking voice is juxtaposed by her full and dramatic Amy Lee-esque vocals, and whose apparent shyness is entirely forgotten with just a few sung notes.

They open their set with the title track off latest album, ‘Wilderness Heart’, an album that, where it found any criticism, seemed to only ever revolve around its having a more polished, and thus, ‘produced’ sound than their earlier works. But the sincerity and sheer rock that they bring to this song quickly dissolves any apprehension.

This force is maintained throughout their set, with slower songs such as Angels and The Space of Your Mind providing appropriate lulls throughout that thankfully don’t ever last quite long enough to make the set lose its momentum. The band dips into tracks from ‘Wilderness Heart’ and 2008’s ‘In the Future’ in equal measure, with the occasional treat from their self-titled offering in the second half of the set. Stephen McBean’s guitar solos push around and melt the crowd in turn, while The Night Terrors’ Miles Brown’s accompaniment on the theremin for Let Spirits Ride is appropriately eerie and awesome.

Their encore perhaps best exemplifies the balance they have managed to achieve with their song selection over the course of the set, with one from each album chosen to thrill fans, both old and new, but flawlessly finishing with Don’t Run Our Hearts Around, the six minute meandering psych delight from their debut album.

Having previously played host to acts as varied as The White Stripes, Queens of the Stone Age, Ben Harper, The Black Keys, and my beloved Dandy Warhols, it seems that a stop at the Corner Hotel is often one on the road to major success, and the members of Black Mountain certainly have the talent to follow it through.

(Photography credit: Zahra Khamissa)