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Arts and Culture
Music

What the Hell, Stephen McBean?

The Pink Mountains' latest album has a bizarre centrepiece.

Alex Hudson 15 May 2014TheTyee.ca

Alex Hudson writes for various music publications and runs a blog called Chipped Hip.

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Former Vancouverite and penis-scrawler Stephen McBean

Stephen McBean, what the hell were you thinking?

That thought will cross many listeners' minds when they listen to "North Hollywood Microwaves," the face-palm centrepiece of the Pink Mountaintops' newly released album, Get Back. The song begins as a satisfyingly chaotic garage rock number, its clanging guitars serving as the backdrop for squawking sax leads. But things take a surreal turn about halfway through, when Annie Hardy of Giant Drag takes the mic to deliver a lurid sex rap.

I'll spare you the pornographic details, but her stream-of-consciousness verse includes rhymes about bodily fluids, genitals, bestiality, and sex acts so filthy I'm fairly sure they're urban legends.

I despised it on first listen, but I've since grown to appreciate the song's shocking, car crash-like grotesqueness. It's fascinatingly terrible, and I can't help but respect band leader McBean for agreeing to put such a heinously juvenile rap in the middle of an otherwise expertly composed pop-rock album. It's akin to an artist painting a beautiful portrait and then, as the finishing touch, scrawling a huge penis in the centre of the canvas. Ta-da!

Of course, this is only one of ten songs on Get Back. The album is more noisily raw than the Pink Mountaintops' gorgeous 2009 album Outside Love, although it's brighter than McBean's work as the co-vocalist of local hard rock combo Black Mountain.

Opener "Ambulance City" begins the LP with surging rhythms, clanging guitars, and vocal hooks that shift between ragged-throat screams and computerized tunefulness, while "The Second Summer of Love" is a horn-spiked stomper that's filled with nostalgic remembrances of 1987. Elsewhere, "Through All the Worry" and "Sixteen" cloak their sunny melodies in heavy distortion, and closer "The Last Dance" ends the collection with a sprawling jam that gradually fades out before unexpectedly returning to full volume as a final exclamation mark.

McBean lives in Los Angeles these days, but he'll be returning home to Vancouver to perform at The Fox on May 23. I'm guessing that he won't be bringing Hardy with him, but perhaps he can recruit a local MC with no sense of shame to grab the mic and offer up a verse on "North Hollywood Microwaves" -- the more disgusting the better. [Tyee]

Read more: Music

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