You could probably guess roughly what Black Mountain sound like from the cover of their fourth album, which features, variously, a mysterious helmeted/masked figure, a little girl playing, a flaming plinth and Concorde. It’s time to set the controls for the heart of a pagan, doomy 1970s, where spacey synthesisers combine with doomy metallic riffs, and you can just about pick out the band through the haze of weed smoke. But maybe you need the haze of weed smoke to get the most of it: IV lacks the intense attack of the group’s very best work. Perhaps it is dissipated by the length of some of the songs: opener Mothers of the Sun stretches past eight minutes, demanding you surrender to the drone; it’s Sabbathian, but without the colossal power of the equally long opener of Black Sabbath’s fourth album, which feels like a touchstone here. (Over and Over) The Chain spends three minutes noodling on synths, Crazy Diamond style, before bringing in the riff, which then unfolds for a further minute before Amber Webber and Stephen McBean start singing. It all probably sounds immense and all-engulfing live, but it feels a little anticlimactic at home.
