Wilderness Heart
'Wilderness Heart', the new album by Black Mountain, is packed with succinct rock songs that pulse and pound with startling precision: it pummels you and you ask for more. This is arguably the band’s tightest, most concentrated venture, but there’s still plenty of raw rock energy at work. “It’s our most metal and most folk oriented record so far,” songwriter Stephen McBean says. “I’m not gonna say it’s our best record or the album that we always dreamt of making ‘cause that’s what everyone says. It’s all about where we were at the time the machines were rolling. You can’t control the electricity or how your limbs were moving that day. You have to erase the visions and just go along for the ride.”
Stephen McBean's boogie outfit makes a more concerted effort to reconcile the band's inner darkness and light, leaning as much on pop as psych.
Black Mountain has always courted comparisons to the monsters of ’70s rock, but Black Sabbath and Deep Purple wouldn’t have known what to do with a woman as ballsy as Amber Webber, whose house-shaking howl finally moves from the periphery to the center of the band’s rumbling sonic molasses on Wilderness Heart. Webber…
Stoner riffs coexist with acoustic reveries on the Vancouver band's enjoyable third album, writes <strong>Michael Hann</strong>