The Mountain, the new four-song 10″ from C’mon, Canada’s premiere bleary-eyed bastards of fuzz, kicks off with the longest, most ambitious song the band has ever laid down. Until now, the seven-minute track “Fortress of the Night” from 2010′s Beyond the Pale Horse held that distinction, but this here title track, which commands all of side A, clocks in just shy of 12 minutes, and reaches an epic and dangerous precipice the band had only previously admired from afar. C’mon has built an outstanding reputation as a band that can move a mountain by sheer rawk force alone, but this time they do us one better and scale the entire fucking thing in a burnt-out van, blowing dirty exhaust the entire way, planting their tattered flag at the top when they land. What they unleash on the world below is a spacey rumble of arena bravado and prog-crunch, a steady build-up of monolithic metal like a giant analog amp rising up from behind the fires of the sun. Musically, “The Mountain” is more dense and layered than anything C’mon has done in the past* and that kind of studio presence/trickery continues as the band bounds on down the back side in its usual muddy-riffed fashion, turning thrusters on high and heavy with “It’s Alright,” the wonky instrumental “The Grunge,” and a cover of The Osmonds’ “Crazy Horses,” a pretty weird beard song to begin with that is given a special kind of supercharged Blurtonian treatment here. Okay, I know you’re waiting for me to say it, so here it is: C’mon does it again.
*Singer/guitarist Ian Blurton has said in an interview that at one point in the song there are two versions of the band playing against each other, so two drum kits, two basses, and about 25 guitars, which he called a tribute to Voivod’s Piggy and Thin Lizzy’s Gary Moore.
You should see it around here, man. It’s all exploding hearts and raging boners and hot sparks, which kind of sounds like a sweaty Saturday night at the steel mill, but really it’s just me on cloud nine in the rock n’ roll sky that opened up above me the second I dropped the needle on this glorious slab of coke bottle clear wax. A new C’mon record can, without much effort at all, make your entire life worth living, so the fact that it’s been three years since their last full-length, Bottled Lightning of an All Time High, means we’ve been comatose for quite awhile now. But here comes our heroic power trio, Sir Ian Blurton, Katie Lynn Campbell, and Dean Dallas Bentley, riding in on this pale horse to save the fucking day, to shock us back into coherence with their brilliantly boss fuzz n’ roll. Beyond the Pale Horse, then, is like a shot of adrenaline right into your balls, like most C’mon albums are, naturally, and like previous albums, its beauty lies in its beastly nature, its ability to shift and deviate while still remaining furiously savage. The play this time is that the electric noise is saturated in dreamy effects, and C’mon mixes some foggy, psychedelic magic in amongst their usual motor-driven madness. Dig the catchy title track and the majestically groovy – and unusually long – “Fortress of the Night” for the freakiest examples. But for sheer riffola, “Midnite is the Answer,” with its stoner crunch, is the one that pumps my blood. C’mon prove, once again, that they are almighty and untouchable.
*That’s not the record I own, but it looks just like it. Courtesy of whomever took the pic. It might’ve been Tony.
Ok, I don’t have an mp3 from the album to share (I just got it in the mail), so go buy the album from Yeah Right! to hear it for yourself. In the meantime, enjoy an older C’mon video of them washing their van and kicking it live!
C’mon
C’mon