Black Mountain singer and guitarist Stephen McBean took this interview while driving in Los Angeles.
It's fitting, because the band's latest album 鈥� Destroyer 鈥� is in part a psychedelic homage to driving, described by Pitchfork as "conceived and sequenced as a soundtrack to an epic desert road trip." McBean's relationship with driving is relatively short, having only gotten his drivers licence a few years ago. However, as a resident in one of the most car-dependent cities in the world, McBean seemed pretty relaxed speaking behind the wheel, from talking about the protests in LA that day, the National Guard and Marines being called in, to asking me how long I've lived in the Comox Valley, how big the population was here now, and which part of the community I lived in.
Eventually we got around to talking about Black Mountain's upcoming show in Courtenay.
McBean is actually quite familiar with the Valley. He grew up in part in Sidney, and travelled around Vancouver Island a lot as a kid. He said that this tour was kind of a way for the band to get to some of the smaller coastal communities.
"We're doing our little coastal B.C. tour because now there's all these their pockets of people either moving back to you know Powell River and stuff. There is lot of little Victoria punks that live there. So we can actually do these little Vancouver Island tours. 台湾MM裸聊室 B.C., Beachcombers-style."
Growing up as a punk in Sidney in the 80s, McBean knows how exciting and fundamental a bigger band coming to town can be for a kid who is just getting into music. In a way, Black Mountain's upcoming mini-tour is him and his band revisiting some of the smaller communities and venues to bring their music to kids just like him.
"We just played like a warehouse band that was great. I mean you're all just kind of playing to the people right in front of you or the people way at the back. I don't know the intimate shows they can definitely be like the most nerve-wracking and the most exciting," he said.
"Growing up in Victoria it meant a lot when some out of town band that you love came and played in your little weird town. It's not like in those bigger cities where you get every band through there. I have those shows that meant a lot to me when I was a kid, so hopefully these shows have like a similar similar effect on some kid too that's maybe just starting a band with their best friends or something for the first time."
So he and Black Mountain are bringing their unique blend of heavy, trippy psychedelic rock to the Comox Valley. McBean is joined by Jeremy Schmidt, Adam Bulgasem, Amber Webber, and Arjan Miranda.
"It was like a weird time for Canadian indie rock when like we made that first album," he said. "We definitely had like a there was a gut feeling that we were on to something special ... like everyone from like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the Arcade Fire, to us, to Wolf Parade were all kind of lumped in with this Canadian invasion of the world rock and roll landscape, which was kind of funny."
Since then, they've ridden that wave, releasing five albums, two of which have been shortlisted for the Polaris Prize (In the Future and IV), one longlisted for the same prize (Wilderness Heart) and have had a few Juno Nominations in there too. Though the band's self-titled debut was released twenty years ago, McBean said they still play the older songs.
"We play stuff from like all the records. There's a new stuff, there's old, all the stuff in the middle," he said. "There's some that you can't really change that much, but there's some that are more open with like improv type areas. But I mean it's nice to like same thing be able to play like Druganaut after 20 years and people still get hyped live."
"It's exciting when people take interest in your music and start showing up ... There are some people that saw us on the early tours they're like bringing their kids now and stuff, which is cool," he added.
Though it has been a few years since their latest album, which was released in 2019, McBean and the rest of the band have been busy with other projects, tours as well as dealing with the lingering effects of the pandemic. That's not to say there's not new Black Mountain material in the works.
"We're slowly trying to put together a new record, hopefully we'll finish soon, but we still have a ways to go," he said. "There's always three or four songs that kind of become the nucleus, you know, the heart of the album. Then once you kind of usually you you have a bunch of songs, but then the album takes turns up taking more shape."
"Some of the older (songs), they're like kind of so dialed into your like DNA that it's nice to keep yourself on your your toes, playing something new," he added.
McBean's friend Keith Parry is the manager of the Comox Valley Curling Centre, but the two of them go back to the days when Parry was running Scratch Records in Vancouver. Parry is promoting the show through his promotion company CVGB's, and McBean thinks it will be the first time Black Mountain have played at a curling rink.
"I would go to the Marpole Curling Rink with Keith when he was still living here, on the border of Vancouver and Richmond. But yeah it's like tides have turned and you can have rock and roll shows at curling clubs now," McBean said.
Black Mountain will be joined by Vancouver's Heavy Trip. The show is on July 13, with doors at 6 p.m. at the Comox Valley Curling Centre. Tickets are available at .
