The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Black Mountain’s Stephen McBean, Jeff Tweedy and I have something in common: we all suffer from migraines. I had one last month, and it involved quite excruciating, throbbing pain, vomiting, the odd hallucination and muscle spasms. I don’t recommend them. Tweedy’s got so bad and so frequent he ended up in rehab, addicted to painkillers, and upon meeting Black Mountain at a King’s Cross hotel, I’m robbed of an audience with McBean, the band’s songwriter and vocalist, because his own shuddering appointment with the toilet porcelain was in progress.

“It’s because of the change in the seasons,” says bass player Matt Camirand of his leader’s condition. In McBean’s absence, it was Camirand and vocalist Amber Webber who took ‘meet the press’ duties for the Vancouver rockers that night.

Both of them are familiar with health problems infinitely more serious than what befell McBean, as both have day jobs working for an organisation that cares for the drug-addicted, the mentally ill and homeless, of more in a minute. But first things first: Black Mountain, as Camirand explains it, “just wanna rock”.

And on their first album, released in 2005, they do exactly that. Here is a clinical exercise in taking as heavy a riff as possible and battering it to within an inch of its life, yet McBean (like Tweedy?) is sensitive enough to rein it in as and when necessary. All this banging away at their electric/electronic noise has led to a critical reaction that deems them one of the most derivative bands around. An edited list of reference points would include Sabbath, Zeppelin, Velvets, Neil Young, Floyd, Free, yaddah yaddah yaddah.

“It doesn’t seem like that’s digging very deep for a musician,” sighs Camirand. “I know thousands of bands who all have those influences so it doesn’t really scratch the surface very much.”

But Black Mountain are proud to wear their influences so loudly on their sleeve, and when I put Sean Lennon’s comments of last year to them - “It’s impossible to make something original, only what sounds beautiful” - Camirand and Webber are in instant agreement.

“That’s true, that’s true,” says Webber. “It’s a waste of time to try and make something that sounds original.”

“Yeah, why would you want to anyway?” chimes in Camirand. “Being in a band is just living out the fantasy of being in a band like the bands you love and grew up listening to. So why wouldn’t it sound like all that stuff?”

The Black Mountain five come from Vancouver, a heavily arts-minded city, but without the rock renaissance of, say, a Montreal. It is also Nickelback’s hometown, as Camirand bemoans. Modern Vancouver for these two can be characterised by two things: the first is, as Camirand states, “A lot of yuppy families who used to be hippies; there are a lot of leftist viewpoints, a lot of cool parents.” The other is a world-class aquarium, mention of which he meets with enthusiastic approval: “Yeah, the aquarium’s fucking awesome. A friend of mine held a listening party in there for when OK Computer came out. There were all these headsets and you’d listen to the album and watch the whales swimming.”

In recent years, however, a third aspect of the city has forced its way onto the skyline: the Black Mountain Army. This quintet, currently promoting new album In The Future, are only part of a wider community of musicians, artists, filmmakers and photographers in the city who all work together on collaborative projects. McBean is also frontman for Pink Mountaintops, while Camirand and Webber also play around in other outfits in time between periods of Black Mountain activity. It might sound all very communal and counterculture and flower power-spirited. It isn’t.

“We were trying to figure out a website address,” explains Camirand. “Black Mountain dot com was taken so we used Black Mountain Army, then we started joking about how funny it would be if we started calling our whole thing an army, as opposed to a ‘collective’ or some kind of hippy shit. It’s a loose group of our friends in Vancouver that we like to tour with, play music with and have our photo taken with.”

“There’s no card carrying membership, it’s not a clique,” adds Webber.

As well as these artistic endeavours, there is a common day job that unites many members of this collective… sorry… big, bad army. Camirand, Webber and McBean are three of four Black Mountain members who work for Insite, an organisation that seems to have a pretty enlightened way of dealing with addiction, mental health problems and the like. “It entails trying to keep people alive for a little while longer until they can get their life together,” says Camirand, “and doing it in a way that doesn’t harm their sense of dignity towards themselves. These people often feel it’s a bunch of doctors and nurses telling them what they have to do, whereas we just take care of them and try and manoeuvre them down a path where they can help themselves.”

“We don’t try and force them to do anything, it’s a harm reduction kind of job,” says Webber, yet another of her many addendums throughout our meeting.
The relationship between this draining work and the band’s music is an interesting one. Camirand and Webber agree that music acts as a respite from the emotional stress of Insite and that touring with Black Mountain allows them time away to recharge themselves, rock out and party hard before returning to work.

Furthermore, while it’s not overt on either of their records, it would be surprising if their travails with Insite didn’t inform their songwriting to at least some extent. I’m reminded of Chuck Palahniuk, who as a budding writer volunteered in a home for the terminally ill in order to gather material for his fiction. It’s not quite like that for Black Mountain.

“It changes you as a person,” says Camirand, “as you see a lot of stuff that your average working person doesn’t see. But I don’t think you can see something crazy and go, ‘I’m gonna write a song about that and that’s gonna fix it.’ It doesn’t work like that.

“It’s a bit weird, it’s a very fine line tastefully, because these are human beings with wives and families and it seems arrogant to take something like that and turn it into a song. It just feels like your taking your work home.”

“Music’s an escape from that,” says Webber, another postscript. “People who aren’t artists or don’t have other outlets tend not to survive long. You need to have a good balance.”

With that, a bit of your average George Bush baiting and reports that Coldplay aren’t that insufferable after all (Black Mountain supported Martin and Co. on a 2005 tour of the States), it was back to the lobby, where an exhausted, deflated Stephen McBean stood, eyes bloodshot, migraine over.