Black Mountain Bring The Future To The Present

If earplugs didn't exist, I would be deaf right now. Well, if that was the case, I'd probably have gone deaf a long time ago. But, suspending reality for a moment, if Friday night's show at the Horseshoe was the first I'd ever been to and earplugs didn't exist, then I would, in fact, be deaf right now.

Thankfully, this isn't the case on either count. I imagine, however, that almost everyone in the room who didn't use those little pieces of foam wanted to kick themselves by the end of Black Mountain's performance, and their ears are probably still ringing four days later. This was, without a single doubt, the loudest show I have ever attended.

Weirdly, it got off to such an inauspicious start. While Seattle's The Cave Singers most prominently feature Pretty Girls Make Graves' Derek Fudesco on guitar, it's singer Pete Quirk who's the band's most compelling figure. Love it or hate it, the man has got a voice that belongs on a stage. The group played most of their recently released debut, Invitation Songs, with "Seeds Of The Night" and the chilling "New Monuments" standing out in the dimly lit and increasingly full Horseshoe.

Then things took a turn for the insane. Brooklyn's Oakley Hall filled the stage and, led by former Oneida player Pat Sullivan, proceeded to blast the doors off the outside bar. For a group steeped in an alt.country sound, it's simply impossible to describe how noisy Oakley Hall were. For a while, I hoped it was just an aberration that the sound guy would fix. But it quickly became evident that the sound guy had just as much to do with the volume as the band did. The group played an upbeat set that garnered huge applause from the now-thick audience. I'm not a huge fan, so I'll say it was decent.

On the other hand, you couldn't find many bigger Black Mountain fans than me. Their self-titled debut is one of my favourite Canadian records of all time. "No Hits" ranks as one of my favourite songs. So it's fair to say that I'm pretty excited that their sophomore effort, In The Future, is finished, and that we would be privy to most of it.

As it turned out, if you weren't into the new, you likely weren't into the group's first official Toronto appearance in almost exactly two years. That's because the band played seven of the 10 songs that will appear on In The Future, as well as "Thirteen Walls" and "Bastards Of Light," the songs that appear on the group's tour-only vinyl release. I guess there's one other thing that might have turned a few people off — a sonic boom of volume that emulated that used in sleep depravation torture.

Black Mountain might only have Steve McBean's guitar on their side, but it's as loud as seven. Add Matt Camirand's booming bass and Jeremy Schmidt's treble-scorching keyboards, and I've never seen so many concert-goers plugging their ears in my life. That said, the volume was essential to the band's new material, which was as forceful and magnetic as anything on their self-titled debut.

Amber Webber has been moved to centre-stage, while McBean has switched to the right side, and it's easy to see why the exchange was made. Webber is often the lead vocalist on the new tracks, rather than mostly backing McBean's soft drone as she has in the past. McBean's no fool — he knows talent when he has got it, and what he has in Webber is one of the best singers in indie rock.

But make no mistake, it's still the bearded frontman's show. He was at his blazing best during mid-set hits "Draganaut" and "Don't Run Our Hearts Around," and his searing guitar work, courtesy of roughly 27 distortion pedals, kept the room rocking from start to finish.

By the time Black Mountain arrived at the seminal "No Hits," many earplug-less attendees had fled for quieter ground ("Can you be quiet? I can't hear the band," another critic joked near the conclusion, his fingers placed firmly in his hearing holes). Still, the group smartly got the best of the new material out of the way early, securing the kind of buzz they'll need to make In The Future a bigger success than album number one.

Screw that, though — all I needed was the glowing green cube on Joshua Wells' drum kit. In The Future was one of my most anticipated records of the next four months before and after this eardrum-shattering, perfect performance.

Here was Black Mountain's set list:

"Night Walks"
"Stormy High"
"Wucan"
"Bastards Of Light"
"Queens Will Play"
"Druganaut"
"Don't Run Our Hearts Around"
"Thirteen Walls"
"Evil Ways"
"Tyrants"
"No Hits"
"Bright Lights"