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Rating:
Stuff that could be my age, it isn't even my daughter's. What 2008 has managed to bring out best is here in my little hands… apart from the usual and predictable confirmations of (my) big names, like TV on the Radio and Portishead, the year just concluded has gifted us/me with this incredibly well-executed maelstrom of everything that punk had swept away in '77 (and I say this as a total punk fan), we're talking about "In the Future", the second effort by Black Mountain.
The first track, as you know, is the dividing line between listening straight through an entire album or starting to play with the needle back and forth between the grooves… well, here the beginning is explosive, as if they had given a jolt with a defibrillator to Toni Iommi…remarkable, an insistent opening to what seems immediately to be the album that achieves the impossible feat of (re)proposing with freshness the psychedelia, prog, hard rock, and (why not) stoner, all together without boring and without causing nostalgia for the originals. The whole double vinyl (because that's the edition to buy, so you can also legally download the respective mp3s) flows really well, the songs have a beginning that never reveals what their path will be… if I have to find a limit to the work, I find the slow tracks a little less spontaneous, apart from the MASTERPIECE of the concluding track which is "Night Walk" that for the occasion borders into the '80s to randomly (and therefore well…) pick from the 4AD catalog… marvelous. Therefore, dear lovers of prog, progressive, psychedelia, classic/hard rock and for all those who think rock died in 1974, treat yourself to a nice gift and purchase a new album from 2008 that will know how to tickle your most sensitive chords.
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Other reviews
By psychopompe
The fundamental elements of Black Mountain’s current sound have been reduced to two: keyboards and guitars.
Despite the title, 'In The Future' speaks a past idiom, and doesn’t always master its terms.
By sylvian1982
A musical rollercoaster appearing more like a compilation rather than the work of a single band with the real possibility of mimicking the sources, which only a great group can try to rein in without falling into rhetoric.
These are Black Mountain, standard-bearers of 21st-century neo-psychedelia. Open applause.
By SUPERBOIA
The Black Mountain live is quite the experience when in the harder pieces McBean lets his SG spew harmonics, and I can say they fully convinced me.
An hour and a half beautifully filled, equally dominated by ’70s-inspired HR, psychedelic folk ballads, and even a hint of prog produced by the keyboard background.
