Arrayed in dystopian garb and armed with righteous indignation, Black Mountain pounds out one explosive song after another, each of which echoes the despair, fear, and disappointment that populates Stephen McBean's lyrics.The world is a bleak place in McBean's eyes. It is full of violence, injustice, doubt, and little else. If hope exists it lay dormant beneath a constant threat of dehumanazing and near-invisible evils. There's plenty of melodrama on In the Future and much of its bombast serves to positively amplify Black Mountain's brute approach to rock 'n' roll. "Stormy High" begins the record with a sudden and heavy jerk. It stomps about wearing tattered guitars and half-moaned vocals with confidence, drawing its sex and grit together closely enough to warrant thoughts of "The Lemon Song" and Robert Plant convulsing on stage in a fit of orgasmic delight. McBean's idea of danger, however, revolves less around his penis and more around enslavement or the kinds of demons that haunt lazy men. Their debt to blues and '70s rock is hard to miss, but the band proceeds to carve the lazy "Angels" out of sweet pop mechanics and epic synthesizer swells. This song is the first sign that Black Mountain is out to do more than rehash the tumultuous birth of heavy rock; they clearly aim to sit psychedelic pop, rock, and metal beside one another, with the stylings of America's "southern rock" music added for good measure. Other bands have gone down this road to varying degrees, but Black Mountain's approach to genre-bending is especially bold. There is no fusion of elements on In the Future, each of these genres are simply mashed together, their individual identities kept pure and separate.
"Tyrants" represents the first all-out mashup on the record. It begins like a titanic military march across a barren desert; the guitars erupt in rhythmic fashion, followed exactly by aggressive drumming. With the introduction of a dusty bass line and resigned beat, the song quickly shifts into a lower gear. Enormous spaces open up in the music and a seething synthesizer begins to circle through the song like a vulture. The lyrics and music then work themselves back into a frenzy propelled by an infatigable disdain for the evil men do. A deep serenity pervades much of the song in the form of cascading electronic melodies and a rubbery rhythm, but its all sandwiched between heavy guitar riffs and a solo that calls Satan to mind more than Timothy Leary. It's neither a metal tune nor a psychedelic rock song nor a blend of these two things; it's a shape-shifting monster that emphasizes rhythmic guitar performance and spaced-out pseudo-improve in equal measure. In contrast, "Wucan" emphasizes psychedelic rock's influence on the band. After a fuzzy and vaguley funky rhythm section sizzles out, the music is shot through with thick, almost cheesy keyboard atmospherics. Those keyboards shimmer and wobble in acidic light while the band plugs along beneath the vast reach of their sound. As is the case with the rest of the album, there is an epic and foreboding quality to the music that reaches beyond the confines of pop and rock convention. Then again, I had to make sure Richard Wright wasn't listed anywhere in the liner notes after the song ended.
The bombast of unrestrained playfulness doesn't always work in the band's favor, however. There are moments where the music is as awkward as some of McBean's more introverted and indecipherable lyrics. "Stay Free" clunks along with a beautiful melody and an ethereal vocal performance, but it sounds flat sandwiched between "Wucan" and "Queens Will Play." After a number of inventive songs the album becomes predictably and upon inspection the lyrics are both confounding and over-simple. Perhaps someone with more time than I can make sense of these lines: "Bodies at sundown / Stiff on their knees / Beautiful ponies / So beautiful / They'll kill us all." On the one hand McBean's concerns come across loud and clear, but on the other hand his desire to compress a range of complex and diverse emotions into only a few lines leaves something to be desired. This is true not only of his poetic abilities, but of the band's musical abilities as well. "Evil Ways" could have been a great voodoo jam spiced with American brute force, but it ends up sounding awkward with its lumpy chorus and superfluous instrumentation. I admire bands that shoot for the stars, but Black Mountain don't always succeed in getting there.
"Bright Lights," the album's 16 minute dénouement, highlights the band's best and worst qualities. The lyrics are less than stellar, but the instrumentation blends the band's gentle and aggressive qualities without flaw. The entire middle portion of the song is an extended psyche-jam brimming over with all manner of interesting minutae. There's a delicate mixture of drone noises and melody on this song and it seems as though the whole thing could fall apart at any moment. The song highlights just how fragile some of the band's compositions are; in their reappropration of multiple genres the band sometimes overlooks the fact that their music depends on just how enjoyable that reappropration could possibly be in the first place. Their energy and confidence helps make some bad songs tolerable, but without that energy the record could have easily fell apart.
That energy is this quintet's greatest virtue and when it is paired with solid songwriting Black Mountain sound both unique and as massive as their name implies.
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