Pitchfork

Before switching on the recorder, I watched as the five members of Black Mountain rolled on and off the stage of Chicago's Empty Bottle, put through the wringer by the Bottle's charmingly particular soundman. Vocalist Amber Webber and I discussed the soy content of Morningstar Farms vegetarian products. There was talk of the weather. More than a few beers were emptied.

Point is, Black Mountain-- Webber, frontman Stephen McBean, bassist Matt Camirand, drummer Joshua Wells, and keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt-- got all the pleasantries out of the way before we went on record. So you'll have to excuse the businesslike nature of the following proceedings... well, it's as businesslike as a scuzzy, good timin' band like Black Mountain gets after a round or two of Coronas. But we had business to discuss: In the Future, the band's second LP and first in nearly three years, drops January 22 from Jagjaguwar.

In the interest of getting down to business, one question was, naturally, at the forefront.

Pitchfork: So is it better than the last one?

Matt Camirand: Much better than the last one.

Josh Wells: It has more songs.

Camirand: Three more.

Pitchfork: Ha, that's something.

Camirand: I don't think I've ever been so excited about anything that we've ever recorded. I don't generally listen to the records we make after the mix is done, but I can still listen to this one and get excited about it. So that's a good sign.

Stephen McBean: When you're dead, you don't want to look at it as album-to-album, but as a body of work. And the way that people listen to music nowadays is totally different. It's all on shuffle. I mean, I still like albums, the whole concept of albums. The packaging and everything. But it's also the body of work and how we grow into each other, layers, like those weird records that are generally considered flops, but ten years down the road they're fuckin' amazing.

Pitchfork: What's the significance of the title, In the Future?

Jeremy Schmidt: We had a song called "In the Future" that was sort of always going to be the title. Part of what I thought was appealing about it was how it related to the lyric in the song. The lyric of the song is, "put them in the future 'cause the future is boring." So it's sort of a grand title, but it negates that a bit in the way it's worked into the song. But then we ended up cutting the song from the album, but we got kind of used to the album having that title, so now we're ending up with this grand album title.

Camirand: It seemed like a record that would probably never come out. So it also works for a release date.

Pitchfork: Really? What was the hold up?

Schmidt: We started working on recording a follow-up album a little over a year ago, and though it wasn't altogether a false start, we just kind of ditched some of the stuff we worked on and decided to start up again. But some of the tracks on it are from those sessions.

Wells: And it was the perfect time. We all had our heads free to really put everything we had into it for like a good couple of weeks. Before, it was a little more, 'oh, let's do a couple songs here whenever we have time.' But this was like 14 days straight, eating and sleeping in the studio, not bathing for a week at a time...

Schmidt: Besides, what else are you going to do in Vancouver in January?

Pitchfork: How did things change between the initial sessions and the more recent ones?

Wells: When we had the false start, we had come off a lot of touring and we had some songs already written and we were playing for a long time. So when we recorded them, it felt like they were older already. It wasn't very spontaneous. And then when we started up again a year later, I think they wrote nine songs in like five days. Which, for us, is a massive amount of work.

Camirand: It was a really spontaneous feeling, and we didn't even finish writing the songs. We just kind of came up with these little blurbs or whatever. And then when we went in the studio for two weeks, we didn't think too hard about how to start or finish the arrangements. We just banged them out and they really seemed to capture that. And like Josh said, everyone was 100% in the headspace and excited to be there and ready to do that.

Wells: There's only so much that we can do. Before we would have ideas and we would work at them but I mean, what it comes down to is, like, we could only do so much. But with [producer and Paper Chase main man] John Congleton mixing and stuff, we could seriously just spend 15 minutes talking to him about everything we wanted to hear, you know, things we don't know how to do and he can do them a lot better than us. We could just channel our indulgent desires through him.

Pitchfork: So having somebody else there was actually liberating?

Wells: I hadn't listened to our first record in a long time, and threw on a couple songs a couple months ago. There's a certain sparse quality to it, basically because of the way we sort of mixed things and could think about things. But on this one, there's just a lot more density going on. But in more of a subtle way, because John was helping us mix it, to really incorporate a wall of sound sort of thing at times.

Camirand: There's a huge difference in the recording and the mixing but not in an overdone way. We still recorded the entire thing ourselves with our own gear and our friend's gear and stuff, but Congleton did things to it that we could never have done ourselves. I think that it's a more dynamic record. The sounds are more interesting. The first record had a great sound, but I would also say it had more of a static mix than this one. It's way more experimental and way more amazing. I think, for the first record, if we made large waves, then John made, like, a tsunami with this record, you know? I think that would be a good way to think about it.

Pitchfork: What are your expectations for the record? Do you see yourself maybe moving up a bit in the ranks, so to speak?

McBean: When the first record came out, we were hoping we would sell 500. So more people bought it, and that's exciting. I mean, you want people to like it, but at the same time it's like you want to feel that it's from yourselves and not trying to be anyone, you know?

Wells: There's so many pitfalls, where it's too soon and you have too much in your head, what people's reactions to your first record have been. Then you're like, yeah, if it's the song that everyone thinks is their favorite in the concert you play, it could steer you more in that direction. And that happens a lot, a band trying to rewrite their most popular song. Sometimes you just need space.

Pitchfork: You guys did this 12" record for this particular tour. You're only selling it here and there, wherever you're going. Does that seem like a response to the way that people are buying music now or was it just something you had around that you wanted to put out?

Wells: It wasn't a strategic move at all. We wanted to bring something on tour new. It felt a bit strange to be doing a tour like this before a new record coming out, so we just wanted something new to take with us. Also, it's pretty cool to just have a different thing like that that favors the people who come out to your shows.

Camirand: Those songs aren't songs that we had laying around. Those are two songs that we were heartbroken to not be able to put on the LP. The LP is so long already and we didn't want to overkill it, but it was a really tough decision to decide that those were the two songs that weren't going to be on the record. So this 12" has a lot of worth to us. It's not like a throwaway thing. It's something to have on the road, to tour with. These are really strong songs for us that we played a long time.

Pitchfork: Part of the catch with this 12" is the coupon inside you can redeem for an early preview of the record. That seems like yet another strategy created to combat early leak culture. Do you guys have an opinion on that, one way or another, the way people are buying music or not buying music?

Wells: Downloading music is fine. With sharing, the only thing I don't like is if someone goes and downloads our record, they're getting a compressed MP3, and it's not sequenced properly and they don't have the cover to look at....

Schmidt: It's like they're getting a Xerox copy of your album

Webber: Yeah, and they can decide that they only want five tracks off the album. It's weird.

McBean: It's also a religious thing of taking a record and, when, like, Kiss' Love Gun comes out, and you're like, fuckin' so stoked.

Camirand: It kind of sucks that it ruins the anticipation of the album release. Once one version of it goes, it's out there forever. It's not like somebody gets a copy of it and makes a tape of it for their friends and twenty people get it. It's like, the entire world can have it if one person leaks it. I hate that.

Wells: When you work really hard to make something that you think is great, you want to present it in a certain way. After that, who cares?

Camirand: Yeah, the next day after it comes out... at least let it come out first.

Black Mountain live:

10-12 Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda's *
10-13 Cleveland Heights, OH - Grog Shop
10-14 Bloomington, IN - Bluebird *
10-15 Louisville, KY - Headliners *
10-17 Norman, OK - The Opolis *
10-18 Denton, TX - Dan's Silverleaf *
10-19 Austin, TX - Emo's *
10-21 Phoenix, AZ - Modified *
10-22 San Diego, CA - Casbah *
10-23 Los Angeles, CA - The Echo *
10-24 San Francisco, CA - The Independent *
10-26 Portland, OR - Doug Fir Lounge *
10-27 Seattle, WA - Crocodile Cafe *
11-03 Vancouver, British Columbia - Richard's on Richards *
11-09 Victoria, British Columbia - Sugar
11-16 Barcelona, Spain - Sala Apolo
11-17 Majorca, Spain - Placa Major
11-19 Cesena, Italy - Officina 49
11-20 Zurich, Switzerland - Rote Fabrik
11-21 Vienna, Austria - Flex
11-22 Prague, Czech Republic - Bordo Club
11-23 Dresden, Germany - Star Club
11-24 Berlin, Germany - Festsaal Kreuzberg
11-25 Hamburg, Germany - Uebel & Gefahrlich
11-26 Aarhus, Denmark - Voxhall
11-27 Oslo, Norway - Garage
11-28 Stockholm, Sweden - Kägelbanan
11-29 Malmö, Sweden - Debaser
11-30 Groningen, Netherlands - Vera
12-01 Utrecht, Netherlands - Tivoli (Le Guess Who? Festival)
12-02 Antwerp, Belgium - Trix
12-03 Paris, France - La Maroquinerie
12-07 Minehead, England - Butlins Holiday Centre (ATP Nightmare Before Xmas)

* with the Cave Singers
! with Oakley Hall