Tonight at the Concorde 2, Black Mountain are doing their very best to try and appear enigmatic. Cast in black silhouette, their faces remain obscured for the entire hour and a half spectacle. There’s no talking, or banter, just monster riffs and prog-rock synthesisers. But that’s fine. Some feel crowd interaction is now almost as essential as the music for an entertaining evening. But it’s a rock and roll show. Not a stand-up. This is rock that exists in a perpetual time warp where the punk rock revolution never happened. While punk brought the band down to the same level as the audience, Black Mountain hail back to bands like Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd who were mythical figures: unobtainable, almost godlike. It has its own charms, after months of catching most music in tiny, 200-capacity-or-less venues, its refreshing to see a proper rock show, with light shows and bombastic sound engineering.
Last year marked the 10th anniversary of the band’s semi-seminal début. But tonight is no nostalgia trip, unless you could argue, perhaps rightly so, the band itself is nothing more than a nostalgic exercise. There’s a new album out, titled simply ‘IV’ like something straight out of a 70s stadium rock oeuvre. ‘Mother of the Sun’ is a suitably grandiose opener. A single pulsing synth note is accompanied by a bluesy, heavy rock riff without any rhythm section to hoist it up, so that it feels weirdly suspended in mid-air. Like most of the songs, the melodies aren’t exactly the star of the show. The riffs are the real hooks and choruses of the songs and the singing often feels like simply stop gaps.
The predominance of the synth is something unexpected. I assume the songs from their rootsy debut tonight have been retroactively fitted with the proggy synth parts to fit them more neatly into their new sound. But going back and listening to them again after the gig, they’re there right from the beginning.
‘Space to Backerfield’ is an intergalactic closer, all pulsing, krautrock rhythm section, with slurping, gulping and bubbling synths like sound effects from a sci-fi B-movie from the 50s. But it’s the encore where everything clicks into place when the galloping rhythm of ‘Don’t Run Our Hearts Around’ comes at you like an unstoppable stampede.
A band making ‘timeless’ music isn’t just a cliché but also somewhat misleading. Black Mountain don’t play music that exists in no time zones but actually multiple times at once. They could simultaneously be a lost 60s hard rock classic, inhabitant of various moments of the 70s including prog rock or the proto-metal of Sabbath and also the stoner rock bands of the 90s that revitalised those sounds. More than any of these – although they would probably fervently disagree – Black Mountain are very much a band of now, freely able to assemble bits from the past to build their own parallel universe.