Roll Call: Black Mountain @ Capital Music Hall Ottawa, On 04/24/09

[RobL]

Very excited for this show. Hope to see a bunch of you out at this one.

Start Time: Friday, April 24, 2009 at 8:00pm

End Time: Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 12:00am

Location: Capital Music Hall

Street: 161 George St.

City/Town: Ottawa, ON

The National Arts Centre's BC Scene presents:

BLACK MOUNTAIN (Vancouver psychedelic/rock, Jagjaguar recs)

http://www.blackmountainarmy.com

http://www.myspace.com/blackmountain

LADYHAWK (Vancouver rock, Jagjaguar/Storyboard recs)

http://www.ladyhawkladyhawk.com

http://www.myspace.com/ladyhawk

THE PACK A.D. (Vancouver garage/blues, Mint recs)

http://thepackafterdeath.com

http://www.myspace.com/thepackad

Friday April 24 @ Capital Music Hall (161 George St.)

Licenced 19+ - 8pm doors - $18 advance (plus service charges)

tickets available at End Hits, National Arts Centre Box Office, Vertigo Records, all Ticketmaster outlets or by

phone at 613-755-1111

direct ticketing link: http://www.ticketmaster.ca/artist/1257528

facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=67767933890

for more information: http://www.bcscene.ca/en/events/eventDetails.asp?eID=433

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Indie rock fans, get ready for a musical ride you won’t forget. Don’t miss psychedelic tunes from popular collective Black Mountain, the haunting sounds of indie quartet Ladyhawk, and the blues-rock dynamic duo The Pack A.D. All three bands have achieved fame and good fortune on the road to stardom.

Black Mountain is a band on a meteoric rise – they opened for superstar band Coldplay, were finalists for the prestigious 2008 Polaris Music Prize, and their song Stay Free was on airwaves everywhere as part of the soundtrack for the smash hit movie Spider-Man 3.

Ladyhawk’s international reputation has been solidified with their latest album described as “a party for the last house standing in a sea of strip malls and condos... Ladyhawk getting loose, turning up loud, downing a few more and howling at the moon.â€

And with influences as diverse as Cat Stevens, Leadbelly and Peter Greenaway, The Pack A.D. is a guitar and drum howling blues duo holding the torch high in today’s garage rock revival, striking with a raw, hell-torn swagger that is equally contemplative and unflinching.

This concert will be recorded for broadcast by CBC Radio 3 www.radio3.cbc.ca

Black Mountain-Tyrants mp3

Edited April 19, 2009 by Guest

[flipzoso]

A big YES. Been looking forward to this show all year. Soo excited. CBC R3 is recording and broadcasting.

Cant wait.

[phorbesie]

in!

[RobL]

in!

nice, thought i saw a faint image of you and velvet in Albany at the dead. from far away through mushroom eyes.

[AD]

Pumped! Not so much for Black Mountain, but for Ladyhawk in a big club full of people!

[bradm]

Pumped! Not so much for Black Mountain, but for Ladyhawk in a big club full of people!

I'd be interested in your thoughts about The Pack A.D., if you manage to catch their set.

Aloha,

Brad

[AD]

from what i've heard of them they're the standard rock and roll two-piece a la black keys / white stripes etc. i'm definitely gonna catch their set. hope their songs are original

[flipzoso]

It was amaaazing that they encored the whole Bright Lights.

Loved the whole night.

[AD]

pack ad were decent, nothing to write home about. i think japandroids do the same thing but much better, and they are playing next saturday in the bc scene.

it frustrates me to no end that every time ladyhawk comes to ottawa they are limited to 35-40 minute sets, even when headlining.

black mountain were ok. they don't really do much for me though. how much of the same thing over and over can one person take? (he asks to a bunch of phish and deadheads, haha)

black mountain setlist

tyrants

angels

wucan

queens

druganaut

don't run

heart of snow

evil ways

shelter

stormy high

and was the encore just bright lights or was there another one or two?

[flipzoso]

and was the encore just bright lights or was there another one or two?

Just Bright Lights in all its 15 minutes.

[AD]

the Citizen goes a bit overboard in their review...

OTTAWA — The greatest thing about the National Arts Centre’s “scene†series – Atlantic Scene, Alberta Scene, Quebec Scene and now BC Scene – may be the wholesale transport of a region’s culture, and therefore its character, to the nation’s capital. But almost as great – and one wonders if NAC CEO Peter Herrndorf anticipated this several years ago when he conceived of the whole “scene†scene – is the diversity of the audiences drawn to the two-week festival. Take Friday night, for example.

In the Theatre of the National Arts Centre was the compelling contemporary dance of Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot. If tradition held, the typical viewer would be around 40, at least moderately refined, and if not above the nation’s average household income, then at least not below it. The viewers would also be more than 50 per cent female, and perhaps markedly so.

The crowd over at La Nouvelle Scene, for the play La vue d’en haut, may be not so rarified but would, obviously, be more French. The fans at the gospel and blues revue in the auditorium of Library and Archives Canada would, one presumes, be more spiritual. Those who squeezed into the NAC’s Fourth Stage for the “literary cabaret†would tend to be, well, more literate, and perhaps more focused on the specific joy of the individual word, as offered up by writers such as Anosh Irani and Steven Galloway.

The focus over at the Capital Music Hall was not so precise. For one thing, the minds there had probably consumed more booze than those at the other venues. They were sweatier, rowdier and certainly louder. Their attention was cast wider, not on the writer’s single word or the dancer’s single step but on the overall vibe – the pounding, pulsing vibe – of Vancouver’s Black Mountain.

Most of the 90-minute show, recorded for CBC Radio 3, came from the band’s stellar 2008 disc In the Future, which was nominated for the Polaris Prize and on many best-of lists. It’s not an aggressive recording, but it is assertive, powerful and intense.

Typical was the first song in the show, Tyrants, which launches with a full-bore blast of guitar, drum and organ, moving like the piston in some grand, quixotic machine. No sooner is the machine warmed up than it’s stopped short, pulled back to empty aural space, and then a brooding bass line and a reluctant drum that seems somehow medieval.

The battles of this fashioned war

Ain't what we've been fighting for

Tyrant, you know your time has come

As soldiers emptied

Their rounds into your side

Tyrant, you know your time has come

As soldiers marched on ...

your empty skin

So the song goes as the music builds itself back up over eight minutes or so, a hearty dose of heavy, brooding art rock, part Zeppelin and part Sabbath, hand-delivered from the spirit of 1971. It’s a curious thing that the album is called In the Future, given the band’s unfettered embrace of the past, its eagerness to feed the tropes of classic psychedelic rock into those pistons and grind them into something fresh, something that thumbs its sweaty nose at pop-culture convention.

Next came Wucan, also from In the Future and clearly the band’s psychedelic peak. If the guiding premise of stoner rock is to get a hypnotic riff and repeat it ad infinitum, then Wucan is pure. It has a lilting riff that climbs nonchalantly, skeptically, like an eyebrow being raised. The vocals float over the top, otherworldly, and equal parts oblique and sincere.

No, you don't

Ever wanna get some place where you cannot believe

High up on the sun

The haunted ones

Howlin' in your head

"Yeah, it's a broken scene"

That won't bring you home

But we could come together

Yeah, we could come together

All in all, Wucan is a perfect stoner rock jam.

Black Mountain believes in their music, at times it seems almost naively so. The music revels in its old forms, and the lyrics are entirely devoid of cynicism. You get the sense that the members of Black Mountain – Matt Camirand, Joshua Wells, Stephen McBean, Amber Webber and Jeremy Schmidt – were not the cool kids in high school, but nor were they the uncool kids: they were the kids who didn’t give a rat’s ass what the other kids thought, because the question never occurred to them.

The kids believe in them now. Listeners of Radio 3 voted that Stormy High had the “best hook†of 2008. It came late in Friday’s show, a powerful bit of guitar work, potent in its simplicity – just one riff twisting and curling back upon itself, over a sky of swirling, unsettled power chords, Amber Webber’s ethereal voice soaring in the background and skittering off like an over-caffeinated heart valve, lifting the entire hall into the eye of the storm.

It wasn't the doctors that finished the pills

He wants the ones that don't crack

But they're dangerous like barbed wire ties

Oh stormy stormy minds

Who knows what it means? Who cares? It’s a brilliant stoner marching song. If John Philip Sousa had smoked B.C. bud, he would have written Stormy High 100 years ago. They would have loved it then and the crowd loved it Friday night. They stomped their feet, pounded their fists into the air and sucked back the dregs of their Labatt 50. That’s what Black Mountain does to you. An associate put it best when he wrote on Facebook this week, “I once had a homeless guy start headbanging and maniacally two-stepping beside the car whilst I cranked Don't Run Our Hearts Around. Stoner rock knows no social boundaries.â€

Nor does BC Scene. Each event is in its own venue, with its own purpose and its own crowd, but somehow they all — stoner rock, literature, gospel, dance, etc – become one shared, grand thing. “We could come together,†Black Mountain sang, as midnight beckoned and another day of the festival neared its end. “Yeah, we could come together.â€

[RobL]

fun show, 7 dollar beers sucked. but i still had fun. the opening bands i couldn't really get into. ladyhawk started jaming a bit and i was hoping they would jam a little more. they were pretty good. Black Mountain was very nice, as expected. Can't get over how much the lead singer sounds like Grace Slick from jefferson airplane.. here are my picks.. Black Mountain external facebook picks link

[AD]

You can listen to the show again here

Really good picture set 1

Really good picture set 2

Parts of the show will be released on an upcoming radio 3 sessions podcast

[RobL]

Sweet. i will record that when i get home. thanks