Black Mountain side-project returns
with an obsessive ode to unrequited love
Since the topic of love is the most
widely used and abused theme in all of pop music, Pink Mountaintops’
Stephen McBean can be forgiven for poking a little fun at his
ten-song study in romantic melodrama by using Danielle Steele worthy
romance-novel artwork on the album cover. But despite his attempt at
levity, Outside Love is not a light-hearted affair, with ugly
accusations and frustrated pleas making its references to vampires,
devils, and rotting appendages seem understated by comparison. If
these songs add up to a love story, it’s not the sort that’s
likely to turn up in a supermarket checkout line paperback any time
soon.
As the head of the loosely assembled
“Black Mountain Army,” a Vancouver musical collective that
includes over a dozen bands, McBean has his hands full as both the
driving force behind flagship act Black Mountain and contributor to
various other projects. But where previous Pink Mountaintops releases
sounded a bit tossed off and crudely drawn, Outside Love is an
intricately illustrated affair, built out of druggy walls of guitar
feedback, reverb-drenched male/female vocals, and leaden drum
splashes. Like the thick blue velvet and garishly florid novel on the
album’s cover, these are songs that are rich with texture and
content, designed to fit together like chapters in an unfolding
musical narrative.
Opener “Axis: Thrones of Love”
serves as both an introduction and a thesis statement, establishing
the album’s groggy wall-of-sound and McBean’s heartsick persona,
as he drapes searching rhetorical queries over glacially flowing
guitar fuzz and piano chords. It’s a formula that is broken down
and reassembled numerous times throughout the album, from shimmering
ballads with dewy electric guitars (“While We Were Dreaming”) to
somber string-laden meditations (“Vampire”) and woozily swirling
merry-go-round ditties (“Come Down”). And despite the general
mood being somewhat restrained, McBean mixes in a few country-folk
sing-alongs and stomping synth-rock riffs to balance the reflective
mood. Best of all is “And I Thank You,” a swirling gospel-tinged
duet with Jesse Sykes, whose greasy piano and pedal steel make it
sound like an Exile on Main Street outtake.
Outside Love isn’t the first time
McBean has created an album-long meditation on love, as Pink
Mountaintops’ self-titled 2004 debut was similarly thematically
focused. But while that album tended more towards lust, with songs
titled “I (Fuck) Mountains” and “Sweet ’69,” this one is
driven by a more desperate and dangerous spirit, as if its latent
frustrations could erupt into violent or self-destructive gestures at
any moment. That sense of ominous tension ultimately becomes the
album’s central character, with every aching vocal and wobbly chord
change adding subtext to McBean’s remarkably restless musical
monologue.