Black Mountain’s
on the rise

Music Row
By Brian Rademaekers

Five days in and there is still plenty of steam left in the sixth annual Northern Liberties Music Festival being staged at Fire. Tonight, Birdie Busch and six other acts will be winning hearts with their Valentine’s Day special, while Friday brings in the festival’s hip-hop night with local champ Don McCloskey.
On Saturday, the weeklong jam will come to a head with the help of pop masters and headliners Illinois before a raucous Sunday jamboree paying tribute to Radiohead.
But if you still haven’t gotten your fix or just can’t catch any nights at the Fire, despair not. February is shaping up to be a pretty good month for music in Philly.
On Wednesday night, the 20th, look to Johnny Brenda’s for two bands that should soon be an important part of your music collection.
Headliner Black Mountain has already made a strong name for itself, starting with the band’s ripping self-titled debut in 2005.
That album was notable for being an especially addictive and eclectic mix of bright pop songs artfully interspersed with deeper and longer excursions into guitar-rich psych rock.
Kicking off the album, starter Modern Music — with its lackadaisical vocals, oddly placed horns and ironic lyrics — is a satisfying listen that hints toward a band with a kind of Modern Lovers playfulness and Lou Reed coolness.
Others, like the warm and rolling No Satisfaction, take on a direct re-invention of the spirit channeled by you-know-who, but with an updated Vaselines-esque backdrop.
As the album unravels though, that goofy creativity becomes enmeshed with darker, heavier rock grooves, showing a band that has a taste for revisionist romps through aged pop as well as the exploration of gritty new realms.
In the midst of bridging these two sonic worlds, Black Mountain also manages to work in relevant social critique spiked with raw passion and suggestions of drug abuse — all without departing from music that is pure joy to listen to.
It’s a cauldron of weirdness that makes for excellent rock, but the schizoid pop/rock beast paradigm of their debut has shifted a bit with last month’s release of In The Future.
Here we see Black Mountain, which touts Pink Mountaintops experimentalist Steve McBean as its lead songwriter/vocalist, take on massive proportions in sound and scale.
Swirling and slightly caustic with shades of foreboding, numbers like Stormy High display an element of modernity not exceedingly present in their debut work.
This is reiterated in Tyranny, a wandering and lively collage of synths and rhythmic guitar ended only by a calm and delicate vocal by McBean.
Nothing, though, can prepare listeners for the 17-minute supernova that is Bright Lights, an epic journey across time and space that soaks up a few decades worth of rock ’n’ roll while flitting back and forth in pace, mood, and the vocals of McBean and his airy feminine counterpart, Amber Webber.
Whether they can (or would want to) pull off something of that proportion live at Johnny Brenda’s next week is hard to say. Still, the ambition and guts that it takes to put a monster that size on the tapes is all the evidence you need to know that their live set will be a bold one.
For all the promise inspired by Black Mountain’s latest release, next week’s show also happens to be one of those strange and pleasant moments when the opener and the headliner are jostling for the same status.
Surely, Black Mountain has earned its place in the overcrowded modern-music lexicon. But JagJaguwar label mate Bon Iver is making noticeable ripples with its just-released debut For Ema, Forever Ago.
The two bands occupy entirely different niches, with textures and reference points a universe apart.
With Bon Iver, listeners find emotionality roped in by a finely woven net of folk-style songwriting and indie rock energy.
Bon Iver’s (Justin Vernon) vocals, sometimes strained and searching, sometimes warm and soothing, are the perfect and suitably jagged vehicle for his cutting songs.
Besides the highly personal elements that abound, Bon Iver also channels the type of wispy sentimentality championed by greats like Damien Jurado and Iron and Wine.
Their introduction for Black Mountain next Wednesday may seem too gentle a choice, but it also could be the perfect pairing for a February evening. ••

Check it out . . .

Who: Black Mountain and Bon Iver
What: Two solid bands from the folks at JagJaguwar Where: Johnny Brenda’s, Girard and Frankford avenues
When: Wednesday, Feb. 20. Doors open at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10. Advance tickets are available at the bar.