Black Mountain On Gravitating Towards The Past

It's been seven years since Vancouver hard rockers Black Mountain made the long trip Down Under, but they return armed with their epic fourth album IV, a collection which signifies a return to the free-flowing majesty of their formative work.

"I listen to some contemporary music, but for the most part my view goes backwards - my gaze is cast backwards constantly." 

"We definitely wanted to make a record that had a bit more of the sprawling dynamics that are unique to the band I suppose, but probably more in evidence on the first two records [2005's Black Mountain and 2008's In The Future]," reflects keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt. "I think we wanted to get back to that a little bit. Beyond that though I think we wanted to experiment and be fairly collaborative with the process, but we didn't really have any preconceived notion of what it should be or otherwise, we just kinda got on with it."

None of which should imply that the more pop-structured third album Wilderness Heart doesn't hold a worthy place in the band's canon.

"No, we love that record, I just think that the process of making it was a little dogmatic or something, less open-ended and a little less adventurous... although adventurous is probably the wrong word because sonically there's a lot going on on that record and I don't think it's so different, really. It's very much a Black Mountain record, but I feel that there's something about the spirit of the first two records and the new one that's maybe a little more in tune with our sort of ID," Schmidt chuckles.

Looking to the past to fuel their old school heavy riffage is something that Black Mountain happily cop to. "I'd say most of our touchstones lay in the past, in terms of things we emulate or gravitate towards or are just part of our DNA really," Schmidt ponders. "I listen to some contemporary music, but for the most part my view goes backwards - my gaze is cast backwards constantly. But it's not so conscious. I do hear bands who've replicated a certain pastiche of some past kind of thing, and it ends up being pretty unfulfilling. It might be exciting to hear as a novelty for a bit, but there isn't much to keep you going back to it.

"Whereas I think maybe our combination of things is a little more perverse or something, there's odd combinations of things that say mix something like Blue Oyster Cult with some kinda krautrock thing - for us that keeps it interesting. I mean we don't consciously ever do anything like that, it just sort of ends up being that way because of the make-up of the band and the way we all kind of hear everything backwards to how another member of the band might hear it. We're always poised at a slightly different angle."