Trading Places
What does a five-person-sometimes more-band of artsy friends, mostly mental health center workers, do for fun?
For a Vancouver collective, they funnel their creative energies into three projects (maybe two and a half, technically speaking) as psyched out as the medication they dispense.
First, there was the alt-country-tinged Jerk With a Bomb, which began in the mid-'90s, but as of late seems to have mutated into the Sabbath-meets-Cream Black Mountain. Before that evolution was complete, de facto leader Stephen McBean appropriated the rest of his crew as backing musicians for his Pink Mountaintops side-effort.
Pink Mountaintops mixes the unassuming irreverence and wit of (smog) and studied tension-building of Six Organs of Admittance into a lusty mix that, when compared to Black Mountain, is lighter (and arguably more fun) in both message and music. Though your take home message might simply be "sex."
"Sweet 69" from McBean's first outing in late 2004 was classic '60s riff rock about that classic position of mutual stimulation. "Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy" was stark, solo clean guitar strumming with some dirty talk over it: "And I came all over myself/Wish I came all over my blouse." The first clue that the post-Jerk With a Bomb McBean had anything other than spawning on his mind was 2005's self-titled debut of Black Mountain. With Zeppelin-sized riffs and haunting backing vocals singing choruses like, "Don't run our hearts around/Don't hit them to the ground," the focus was off the carnal and onto the cultural. The album weighed a ton with its words alone, giving guff to questionable policy decisions, manufactured pop music and the propensity for news to accentuate the negative.
Keeping up his prolific pace, McBean is back again as Pink Mountaintops, playing the foil to its black brethren. The new record feels a lot leaner and sweeter with its spare opener "Comas," where McBean, seemingly repenting for the last, smuttier Pink album, croons "Well, I'm not headed down a highway to hell."
Things quickly pick up, and though never as lead-footed as Black Mountain, the two projects start to show some similar roots, especially in the pulsing bass tugs of "Cold Criminals," the Queens of the Stone Age-cribbed "New Drug Queens" and the gypsy séance of "Slaves." Elsewhere he mixes his new piety with his old porn-predilection on "Lord, Let Us Shine," as he addresses the almighty over one of the more vulgar low-end tones in the Black Mountain Army catalog.
What's next for McBean now that he may or may not have been "saved"? Well, looks like Canada's going to back out of the Kyoto agreement, so maybe his group will inhabit their crusty hippy guise, turn the amps up to 11 and blast out another Black Mountain harangue.