Magic Mountain

Black Stone Cherry’s path to rock and roll stardom has been swift but fairly straightforward. Arriving on the classic rock scene in 2006 with their self-titled album, the band mixed 70s riffage with a distinctly Southern flavour.

The rock press ate them up for their musical prowess, but it was arguably the huge choruses they crafted that really drew audiences’ attention. Roadrunner Records caught wind of this, signing the band and pushing their sound increasingly in a radio-friendly, accessible direction. The fruits of this relationship began with 2008’s Folklore & Superstition, followed by Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea three years later – the latter so radio-oriented that some tracks were penned partially or even wholly by outside writers (a move not held in particularly high esteem by the vast majority of the rock community).

Nonetheless, Black Stone Cherry have quickly established themselves as a potent force, headlining the second stage of the prestigious Download Festival last year and now preparing themselves for a UK arena tour commencing this October. Magic Mountain arrives at a curious time for the Kentucky rockers; a time when Roadrunner have finally given them the creative freedom to do what they want with the record. It’s an album that gives you the impression that the band wanted to do something heavier, akin to their debut, but didn’t want to alienate their newfound radio-rock fandom, which results in somewhat of a compromise between the two. Whether this is for better or for worse is a difficult question to answer.

The album’s perfectly listenable, and good fun really

‘Holding on to Letting Go’ opens the album nicely enough. It’s old-school BSC, with solid guitar work and some shout-along lyrics based on some kind of vague personal struggle that’s never really elaborated on (“Take these burdens, free my soul”). ‘Me & Mary Jane’ (shouldn’t that be ‘Mary Jane & I’?) is an early highlight. Resembling earlier, similarly catchy singles like ‘White Trash Millionaire’ and ‘Blame It on the Boom Boom’, this one’s complete with a chorus about smoking weed as well as fairly-crude-but-never-explicit metaphors about sex. The anthemic title track and pre-release single ‘Fiesta Del Fuego’ both follow in a similar vein, but both also shake up their musical formulae with some gnarly guitar work to keep things interesting.

The album suffers from two main issues. Firstly, ‘Hollywood in Kentucky’: oh dear. A track so saccharine, so bland, and so unremittingly country-pop that even fans of such previous sap as ‘Like I Roll’ may find it hard to swallow. Secondly, many tracks, such as ‘Sometimes’ and ‘Bad Luck & Hard Love’, mix up the band’s influences in a fairly unremarkable and predictable way, the former being an archetypal “slower” tune of theirs and the latter doing the same for their “faster” tracks.

All in all though, the album’s perfectly listenable, and good fun really. Which is, I guess, what Black Stone Cherry are all about.