Stephen McBean doesn’t do days off.
He might not be on tour the day that he takes his interview with the BRAG, but he’s not exactly sitting around and twiddling his thumbs either – instead, the Black Mountain frontman is busy setting up a home studio in his Los Angeles flat, where he moved from the band’s native Vancouver in 2010. “I’m just putting up…” he begins to talk, and then pauses while noise in the background suggests he’s moving some equipment and tools around. “I guess you’d call it soundproofing,” he concludes. “It’s nothin’ special, but it’ll do me.”
It’s this DIY ethic that has influenced Black Mountain’s 2016. On April Fool’s Day, the band unleashed their fourth studio album – titled, fittingly enough, IV – which arrived nearly six whole years after its predecessor. But the ensuing tour more than made up for any lost time – the band immediately and extensively hit the road. Even with over four months separating the release of the album and now, McBean still feels as though the live sound of IV is developing with every tour cycle and to him, it’s a gradual but rewarding process.
“Our albums are pretty much a product of their time – they’re reflective of what everyone’s headspace was like at the time,” he says. “We’re all really proud of the new one. It seems to be translating live quite well. People that are coming to the shows seem to be excited to hear songs from it, which is good for us because we’ve incorporated a good part of the record into the setlist. There’s a creative challenge in taking a record out on the road and learning how to present it as you go. There are bells and whistles that can come with making a song in the studio, but when you’re playing it live the challenge becomes figuring out whether you want to lose the bell or lose the whistle – sometimes, keeping everything in is not an option. It can be difficult, but we’ve had a lot of fun figuring all of that out.”
IV was recorded in Seattle at Avast! studios, and sees the band continue their foray into psychedelia, fuzz-heavy riffage and prog-rock detours through the great unknown. Given the noted gap between releases, during which McBean spent time touring and recording with his other band Pink Mountaintops, it’s not all that surprising to hear the band were not able to instantly click back into formation. “The album was made over the course of about a year,” explains McBean, “where I would come back up to Vancouver and just jam with the rest of the band on whatever stuff they had. We went through a bunch of stuff, and I think for a while things just weren’t happening. It took about five attempts at working on songs for us to get on a roll. After that, things were thankfully pretty painless – I put that down to working with Randall Dunn again, who did some stuff with us on our last record [2010’s Wilderness Heart]. He came to be very influential in terms of the scope of the record and the arrangements that we went with.”
Since the album’s release through celebrated indie label Jagjaguwar, IV has seen a sturdy critical response and a lot of positive appraisal from longtime fans of the band. It’s the individual reactions that have intrigued McBean the most. “There are some people that have been telling us they think this new record is a return to our older sound,” he says. “In a way, I can kinda see where they’re coming from – we were also reissuing our first album [2005’s Black Mountain] at the time of recording IV, so I guess that factored into it. I also think that each record that we’ve made is pretty diverse in its sound. When we were touring Wilderness Heart, we had people writing about the record and talking about it and they were referring to it as an acoustic record – even though that album has a bunch of our most full-on rock songs on it. All we try and do as a band is make albums that we find interesting. You’ve gotta try and not follow anyone else’s rules – least of all your own.”
After a handful of festival dates in North America, McBean and co are headed back to Australia for the first time in years. As well as performing at Wollongong’s Yours And Owls festival, the band are also scheduled to do a run of their own headlining shows. “We’ve always had fun while we were down in Australia,” says McBean.
“I’ve been there three times – I’ve been down with Black Mountain twice and Pink Mountaintops has also played shows there, too. It’s a great place with good people. It’s funny – I haven’t spent a lot of time in Australia, but I’ve become friends with a lot of them through them coming through Vancouver and visiting there. Now when I come to Australia, I’ve got people that I know, which is nice. I think that there is a truly great history of rock’n’roll in Australia, too – some of my favourite bands of all time come from Australia. The Birthday Party, AC/DC, Radio Birdman… they’re all amazing. It’s a good place, man. They take care of us. The shows should be fun.”
[Black Mountain photo by Magdalena Wosinka]
Black Mountain play theFactory Theatre on Monday October 3; and also Yours And Owls Festival, Stuart Park Wollongong, Saturday October 1 – Sunday October 2 with The Sonics, The Coathangers, Bleached and more.
