Iggy and the Stooges' "No Fun" has undergone a renaissance in the last few years, which is not to impugn the song's self-contained awesomeness, or its historical significance as the song that killed the Sex Pistols twenty-seven years ago on that fateful January night in San Francisco. "No Fun" has been mashed up with Salt-N-Pepa, crumpled into garage-soul by The Black Keys, and most notably, elevated to a lounge requiem by Hederos & Hellberg. (Primal Scream vocalist Bobby Gillespie even busted open an insulting audience member's head with a mic stand upon concluding a version of the song.)

Black Mountain decided to just borrow it, throw in some allusive bric-a-brac, and call it "Bicycle Man", as if to test how far indie-classicdom an be stretched. (Weirdly, you can sing Galaxie 500's "When Will You Come Home" over this rearrangement.) The bric-a-brac is conscious: a Half Japanese punk-sax rages on both sides of an early Beatles crescendo, as if to underscore Jad Fair's claim of being greater than the band that underdogged Jesus. And in case you didn't catch the homage to the Beatles' famous Isley Brothers cover (which received its big break after it was featured during the school-day parade scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off), the couplet after the crescendo ends with the words "twist and shout." The production, and the Motown-sludge approach, convince me that "Bicycle Man" is more an old Pink Mountaintops song than a new Black Mountain song.