Apr 03 2008 3:20 pm,
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For a man who can make his guitar howl like a pig of Satan,
“We took a while to make this record,” begins Mumbler McBean, “we were finding something new that made it worthwhile putting out another record, like a different formula, a different energy, finding different faults and strengths and moving round in a way that excites us and makes it a record that hopefully people will think is worth listening to.” At this point, drummer Joshua Wells, who can talk and make fully formed words and everything, joins us. “Going into the studio, part of the point is to make it different to how it is live, otherwise you might as well do a live record.” Co-vocalist Amber Webber is here too, but she doesn’t say anything and my Dictaphone doesn’t register nods.
But, anyway, back to ze music. ‘In The Future’ is the follow-up to 2005’s Black Mountain’s self-titled debut, an album that unveiled them as the world’s stoner-rocking cult heroes and, in a year when Arcade Fire’s debut also came out, helped move the world’s musical spotlight towards Canada (“Before the DJ booth was important, now it’s the drum riser! It’s kind of representative of new found love, or re-found love, of people experiencing live music,” says Stephen of Vancouver, the band’s hometown.) Once they’d finished touring, they went off and formed a Guinness Book Of Records number of side-projects (Pink Mountaintops, Blood Meridian and Lightning Dust to name a few), before coming back to Black Mountainland. “We never really look at it as side projects,” says McBean, “cos it’s just playing music but it’s good cos it lets different things breathe and go their own way and not be forced into the mould of what would be
Then sights were set towards the new album. But what sort of messed-up minds came up with the kaleidoscopic-scuzz of ‘Tyrant’, or ‘Bright Lights’, a song that sounds like My Morning Jacket being buried alive by the riff from Muse’s ‘Knights Of Cydonia’. “Sometimes it’s just like a basic idea, camp fire song sort of thing” says McBean, “then finding a way to play it live, then you go to the studio and record it and it doesn’t work, you try to take it in a different way that still seems natural and exciting, without sounding like us in a garage, you know?” “Some of the songs (on ‘In The Future’) had been around for a while,” states Wells, “and we’d been toying around with them for a couple of years. Others, when we went into the studio, we really had no idea how they were gonna turn out. Basically, we put everything we had into recording and messing around with stuff and they came out in this sort of concentrated two week period we had in the studio.”
So far, so studio talk, but when we mention the lyrics – including such occultish, demonic gems as “We love the night and the witchery” – McBean gives us a flash of
‘In The Future’ is released on Jagjaguwar on January 21st.
