Black Mountain
Black Mountain

Memories from Underground

This rock album by the Canadian band Black Mountain has, for quite some time now, virtually monopolized my player, driving every other genre of music out of my mind, spinning incessantly day after day, hour after hour without tiring me for a second, indeed leading me to a state of addiction and a continuous need to press the "repeat" button.

Yes, this album has practically become a kind of surprising drug and I am still asking myself where all this inexplicable enthusiasm for this music comes from. Relying on reason, I should, in fact, state that it doesn't make much sense to be so passionate about an album of this kind, because it apparently presents music light-years away from my usual listening habits, from my certainties. But after all, thinking about it, this is the least of it, given that I love to contradict myself constantly. But there's more, much more important. By itself, this album has nothing exceptional, innovative, or original. It's a continuous déjà vu from beginning to end. The impression when listening to it is that these musicians have locked themselves in a dark basement, bringing with them their instruments and some of the most beautiful rock albums from the '60s and '70s. Then, after getting drunk on hundreds of listens for weeks while the world continued to live music its own way with a string of cookie-cutter bands, they picked up their instruments and started playing their songs, pulling a little bit of everything from the mass grave of that magical period: Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, The Doors, etc. For this reason, it becomes stimulating even just trying to identify references and scattered citations everywhere. I'm sure many of you would identify many others in this sort of musical potpourri, where you really find a bit of everything from musicals, psychedelia, rock, rock-blues, hard rock, etc., etc. For example, the opening track - "Modern Music" - developed by intertwining a frantic sax, with choruses and guitars, reminded me of some passages from the "Rocky Horror Picture Show". Theatrical and ironic, it's an exhilarating incipit, but illusory because the dark power of the electric guitar at the end foreshadows a completely different atmosphere, which is confirmed by the following tracks, which literally make this backward leap in time.

Each track thus becomes a tableau of an exhibition dedicated to a distant musical underground, which resettles close to us, managing each time to evoke different sensations. Sometimes the strings of the soul vibrate, other times they are bitterly torn, slowly twisted, rediscovering the pleasure of a drawn guitar solo or a melancholic vocal performance, in an alternation of acoustic moments with electric excesses. In short, these fun, exhilarating yet dark and melancholic Canadian artists have made a great album and just won't leave my player, so help me: someone press "stop"... but not immediately.