self-titled - no. 1 - (Page 50) lack Mountain has left the city. Or New York City, at least. Tonight they're upstairs on the second floor of Johnny Brenda’s, a midsized rock club in Philly's Fishtown district. Just one member of the Vancouver quintet is onstage at the moment. Her name is Amber Webber. She’s surrounded by the Cave Singers, a Seattle trio that applies indie appearances like hand-in-jeans lead singers to blues and folk mechanics like beaten washboards and nestled harmonies. Webber has been on tour with the Cave Singers—a Matador act featuring erstwhile Motor City Devil and Pretty Girls Make Graves member Derek Fudesco—for only two weeks. They’ve played shows in days, and for Black Mountain, one day off from a three-night New York stand was full of endless interviews and photo shoots surrounding the band's second album, In the Future (Jagjaguwar). Now that Black Mountain's sitting in a small backstage room, they seem tired but relieved—comfortable with questions and downright playful with one another. The band members agree that Webber, singing with relative strangers in front of complete strangers, sounds perfect. In fact, Black Mountain’s Stephen McBean listens carefully from stage right when Webber takes the stage tonight, her voice rising like steam off pavement in the dead of summer. In 0 minutes, Webber is back onstage with Black Mountain. Throughout an hour, the band bridges much of In the Future with cuts from its self-titled 00 debut. The set coalesces into a solid, lumbering mass that affirms the topography the band’s name suggests—big, steep climbs; short, sudden cliffs; wide, detailed vistas, all built from hard composite rock. Some people zone out, and others dance. Webber, who shuffles and sways when she’s not singing, does both. When Black Mountain is finished, the band members shake hands and pack the van. In a few hours they’ll start driving to a show in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, 0 miles from tonight’s stop. They’ve clocked almost ,000 miles in a little more than a dozen days. At the time, In the Future won't drop for another three months, and in that time the group will play more than 0 shows on two continents to support the album. (A week after the album is released in January, they hit the road for another several dozen dates.) “This is the band where we get to sleep in hotels,” says McBean from behind his beard, adding with a wink and a laugh, “sometimes.” B SET US FREE Black Mountain was an accident, or perhaps a prophecy. It all began when McBean (guitars/vocals) made three records with drummer Joshua Wells under the name Jerk With a Bomb. For the third, they added Christoph Hofmeister on tru mpet and bass and vocals from Webber, a fan and a friend. McBean and Wells’s approach evolved with the new tones that were available in the expanded lineup. The first Black Mountain songs, McBean says, came out of the last Jerk With a Bomb tour. Except Black Mountain wasn’t a band yet—or a band name, for that matter. “Steve came up with the name Black Mountain when he was driving at night when he had no sleep. He was doing an all-night drive, doing a lot of trucker speed,” explains Webber, navigating the streets of Vancouver with cell phone in hand, now two months and 0 sets removed from the Philadelphia show. But that’s only one explanation. McBean told separate reporters in 00 that the band was named after a hill in Saanich, a small city south of Vancouver, and that he’d dreamt Jerk With a Bomb had changed its name to Black Mountain the night before a show in a Vancouver brewery. Others have claimed it’s a reference to North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, a short-lived but fabled school that gathered minds such as Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, the de Koonings and John Cage. And some, of course, believe it simply refers to a pile of hashish. “I think he came up with the name then, but I’m not really sure,” admits Webber, laughing. “I don’t think we’ve ever asked each other. I think I might have heard Steve tell the story in the van one day to somebody on the phone. I picked up pieces of it, and now I have my own version.” In any case, Black Mountain was the latest realization of McBean and Wells’ continual need to challenge and recreate their music through recombining friends and themes. Webber remembers Jerk With a Bomb “as a mellow thing” that “sort of became more of a rock band” when extra members came into the fold. Wells agrees, seeing Black Mountain as the next step in Jerk With a Bomb’s shifting sound. “The first record was sort of hokey country," says Wells, "the second was melancholy folk, and the third was kind of heavy, in a way. We had more of a rock-band element. Things just got more and more rock, and we felt like it was the time for a change.” Hofmeister left the band after a year. But Wells, McBean and Webber continued playing together. With their help, McBean readied the first album from Pink Mountaintops, a band that reins in the sonic scope of Black Mountain for dovetailed pop vignettes and songs about fucking—literally and metaphorically. It’s closer to the other end of McBean’s J. Spaceman spectrum. Vancouver’s Scratch Records—the same label that had released the previous two Jerk With a Bomb albums—nabbed the band in 00. Jagjaguwar, a piece of the Indiana-based Secretly Canadian empire, snagged the debut stateside. Both relationships would hold. Meanwhile, Black Mountain the trio asked Vancouver musician and friend Matt Camirand to play bass. The quartet only played a handful of shows before heading into the studio to cut its debut. When the band decided the record needed keyboards, Wells 0
Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of self-titled - no. 1 self-titled - no. 1 Contents Spiritualized No Age Les Savy Fav The Teenagers Booka Shade Michael Gira Ellen Allien Magik Markers Jens Lekman Yeasayer Daptone Records Tipping Point Boris Fiery Furnaces Black Dice Black Mountain The Black Lips self-titled - no. 1 self-titled - no. 1 - self-titled - no. 1 (Page 1) self-titled - no. 1 - self-titled - no. 1 (Page 2) self-titled - no. 1 - self-titled - no. 1 (Page 3) self-titled - no. 1 - self-titled - no. 1 (Page 4) self-titled - no. 1 - self-titled - no. 1 (Page 5) self-titled - no. 1 - self-titled - no. 1 (Page 6) self-titled - no. 1 - self-titled - no. 1 (Page 7) self-titled - no. 1 - Contents (Page 8) self-titled - no. 1 - Contents (Page 9) self-titled - no. 1 - Contents (Page 10) self-titled - no. 1 - Contents (Page 11) self-titled - no. 1 - Spiritualized (Page 12) self-titled - no. 1 - Spiritualized (Page 13) self-titled - no. 1 - Spiritualized (Page 14) self-titled - no. 1 - Spiritualized (Page 15) self-titled - no. 1 - No Age (Page 16) self-titled - no. 1 - No Age (Page 17) self-titled - no. 1 - The Teenagers (Page 18) self-titled - no. 1 - Booka Shade (Page 19) self-titled - no. 1 - Michael Gira (Page 20) self-titled - no. 1 - Michael Gira (Page 21) self-titled - no. 1 - Ellen Allien (Page 22) self-titled - no. 1 - Ellen Allien (Page 23) self-titled - no. 1 - Ellen Allien (Page 24) self-titled - no. 1 - Ellen Allien (Page 25) self-titled - no. 1 - Ellen Allien (Page 26) self-titled - no. 1 - Magik Markers (Page 27) self-titled - no. 1 - Jens Lekman (Page 28) self-titled - no. 1 - Jens Lekman (Page 29) self-titled - no. 1 - Yeasayer (Page 30) self-titled - no. 1 - Yeasayer (Page 31) self-titled - no. 1 - Daptone Records (Page 32) self-titled - no. 1 - Tipping Point (Page 33) self-titled - no. 1 - Tipping Point (Page 34) self-titled - no. 1 - Tipping Point (Page 35) self-titled - no. 1 - Boris (Page 36) self-titled - no. 1 - Boris (Page 37) self-titled - no. 1 - Boris (Page 38) self-titled - no. 1 - Fiery Furnaces (Page 39) self-titled - no. 1 - Fiery Furnaces (Page 40) self-titled - no. 1 - Fiery Furnaces (Page 41) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Dice (Page 42) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Dice (Page 43) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Dice (Page 44) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Dice (Page 45) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Dice (Page 46) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Dice (Page 47) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Mountain (Page 48) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Mountain (Page 49) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Mountain (Page 50) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Mountain (Page 51) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Mountain (Page 52) self-titled - no. 1 - Black Mountain (Page 53) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 54) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 55) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 56) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 57) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 58) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 59) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 60) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 61) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 62) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 63) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 64) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 65) self-titled - no. 1 - The Black Lips (Page 66)
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