Album Review: Black Mountain "Wilderness Heart"

Canadian five-piece Black Mountain play bluesy rock that veers from a hard and heavy (but always warmly fuzzy) sound to something more sun-dappled and folkish.

Their third album Wilderness Heart alternates growling, riff-driven numbers, like Old Fangs, Rollercoaster, and the album title track, with softer songs such as the acoustic arpeggio of Radiant Hearts and the gentle, bruised folk of Buried by The Blues.

At first it all sounds a bit retro – reviewers inevitably throw up comparisons to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple while genuflecting in the general direction of the hippy movement.

But BM are not mere 70s revivalists. While their songs are deeply rooted in the past, they have a vivid life all their own, something that is brought out by the skilfully interwoven and contrasting vocals of main man Stephen McBean and female cohort Amber Webber.

Colin Liddell
Metropolis
16th November, 2010

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!