Are Campfire Droners Nimble Enough to Evade Craftsmanship?
Weird album of the week is Black Mountain’s self-titled debut. I’d call it “psych-drone-sludge” except it’s more tuneful and lively than those words imply. For instance, you could label the Velvets or the Doors “psych-drone-sludge” but that wouldn’t communicate how they shaped their swamp into rhythm and song. Black Mountain aren’t of Velvets-Doors quality, but they’ve got at least one very good track, “No Hits,” which starts with what sounds like electronica played on regular instruments, drums and percussion doing the interplay-of-metronomical-pulses thing while a sax deliberately squawks outside its range to produce hums and buzzes and faux feedback. The boy singer has a Neil Young quaver, the girl singer a Melanie quaver; they do harmonies that stick like peanut butter, and the thing just keeps building in intensity. The lyrics fall between evocative and evasive: The guy sings “Lemme holler against the rock star dream” without giving any reason why. And oddly enough “Heart of Snow,
