Black Mountain In the Future by: Ed Butler Tue:05-Feb-08 Label: Jagjaguwar Year: 2008 WB rating 86 out of 100

In the future everyone will be hirsute stoners, if Black Mountain have their way. So start throwing Rogaine at your face, bust out the spandex and roll up a fat one, because the '70s metal revival has reached its apogee on In the Future.

To safely negotiate the resurrection of a deeply esoteric and much cherished musical era without being labeled as 'rock revivalists' is a tough ask at the moment, but Black Mountain do so with aplomb. The past half-decade has seen innumerable bands cashing in on a ready-made market, producing music that ranges from uninspired, to insipid, to (occasionally) terrific. That market forces so deleteriously dictate artistic urges is worrisome in itself: that so many burgeoning bands are so willing to embrace the market-driven, get-my-song-on-an-iPod-commercial-take-the-money-and-run ethos to musicianship is ever more so.

So this is more like it. If you're going to play the über-referential, swallowed an entire genre whole card, make it a lay down misere. If you're going to intersperse songs with two minute instrumental interludes, make them absolute barnstormers. If you're going to recreate an entire decade of blues rock, make sure you cover everything. On In the Future, Black Mountain tick the boxes. Balls-out this most certainly is.

Like their mid-‘70s acid-rock counterparts, Comets on Fire, Black Mountain manage to take the spirit of their forebears along on a ride that is firmly riveted in the present, always looking forward while constantly being mindful of what is behind, rather than eyes fixed on the rearview mirror.

It all opens with a monumental statement of intent. 'Stormy High' kicks things off with the kind of riff that catapulted Tony Iommi into rock folklore. But louder. And that's what sets Black Mountain apart from their contemporaries. There are no faithful recreations here, but faithless. Sabbath weren't loud enough, Hawkwind not spacey enough, Gong not weird enough. Black Mountain set about studiously rectifying these historic inadequacies. 'Stormy High' may not have the retroactive funkification that the previous album's opener 'Modern Music' did, but who cares? The riff makes it all okay.

All pontificating about the evils of retro-rock aside, no album which so clearly references the excesses of the mid-70s rock scene would be complete without an epic like 'Bright Light'. Clocking in at 16:41, it is the very essence of an album's centrepiece, consisting of five distinct sections, ebbing and flowing in volume and intensity like the tides. It's impossible to grow weary of 10 minute atmospheric build-ups gradually exploding to a face-melting stoner riff; this happens twice on 'Bright Light'.

But the song's (and one of the album's) real highlight is, just like on their self-titled debut, the vocals of Amber Webber, complementing perfectly the power-nasal inflections of lead dude Stephen McBean – who also has Pink Mountaintops and Jerk With a Bomb filed on his résumé. Webber's hyper dramatic, contralto banshee wail dominates whichever song she lends her formidable pipes to, and serves to differentiate Black Mountain from so many revivalists.

Of course, not everything is break-neck, up-to-11 tumult. 'Stay Free' is positively gentle, McBean switching to falsetto to harmonize with Webber, accompanied by only acoustic guitar and Hammond organ, gently building to a denouement that Neil Young would be proud of. In between those two extremes lie the killer one-two punch of 'Tyrants' and 'Wucan' - the former a miniaturized version of 'Bright Lights', but inverted to open and close much of the eight-minute running time into a thunderous musical harbinger of apocalypse, the latter down tempo and driven by a positively obese bass line which in turn propels a slightly creepy keyboard coda while McBean's vocals provide an oddly twisted interpretation on the hippie ethos.

On In the Future, Black Mountain have consolidated their place atop the tree of all those revivalists/revisionists/hacks who attempt to bring the past to the present. Black Mountain, while paying due homage to the past, have their eyes fixed firmly on the here and now, and as a result have concocted, with hearts (and influences) worn proudly on their sleeves, that most delicious brew: a '70s rock album that sounds as fresh and vital as anything you're likely to hear in 2008.