Wilderness Heart

Fair warning: many who loved Black Mountain's earlier albums of heavy, sprawling stoner rock are gonna hate Wilderness Music. Gone are the 8-minute-plus jams, and greatly reduced are the side trips into Mellotron-laced prog-rock territory. If Black Mountain truly were one of the '70s hard rock bands they idolize, this would be their version of Deep Purple's Machine Head, Jethro Tull's Aqualung, or even Rush's Moving Pictures: albums where a newfound fidelity to concise song forms makes for a more immediately accessible sound. Note that this is different from a sell-out: there's no equivalent here of that awful disco song that Kiss recorded back in 1979. Instead, Stephen McBean, Amber Webber and company rock as hard and as woozily as before, but with a hitherto unexplored facility for pop hooks and a sly sense of humor. Both are on display on the winning opener "The Hair Song," which features a nagging slide-guitar riff and a great chorus built around the tongue-in-cheek couplet "Bang, bang the drum / Children having their fun with the blues." Nearly every track features some ear-catching instrumental element, like the growling Jon Lord organ underpinning "Old Fangs" or the Led Zeppelin III acoustic guitars on the ballad "Radiant Hearts," and McBean and Webber's vocals intertwine effortlessly throughout. Fundamentally, Wilderness Music isn't actually as different from Black Mountain's earlier albums as it seems at first: it's just better at it than before.