Pink Mountaintops

Outside Love (Jagjaguwar)

By Erin Wolf
Published: May 25th, 2009 | 7:00am

Like the sweeping epic romance that Pink Mountaintops’ newest, Outside Love, portrays on its glossily bound cover, Stephen McBean gets all conceptually swoony with loads of atmosphere — but keeps it laced with enough bite and deadpan morbidity to avoid the saccharinity found in said novels.

Finally getting his wits about him after the wonderful, but directionless, 2006 release, Axis Of Evol, McBean takes his side project (normally fully occupied with Black Mountain) and creates a more lucid album than the Bible-thumping Axis Of Evol. Opener “Axis: Thrones Of Love” spaces out into a bed of slow but steady guitar distortion, vast percussion complete with ‘60s pop-style sleigh bells, and choral vocals questioning, “How deep is your love?” McBean drawls like a man broken, “It was cheap and made of plastic.”

Enlisting the help of a collective including Jesse Sykes, Sophie Trudeau (A Silver Mt. Zion), Ted Bois (Destroyer), Josh Stevenson (Jackie-O Motherfucker), Amber Webber (Black Mountain), and more, Outside Love refrains from becoming too introverted in its group setting. Pathos channeled through its morbid subjects, the loveless and broken, are glorified and raised to hero status in this 10-song novella penned entirely by McBean. Vampires, angels, and demons populate the songs that sway and settle between trembling vastness (“Outside Love” and “While We Were Dreaming”) and vehement rousers (“The Gayest Of Sunbeams”). Somewhere in the middle, the majority of the album hovers with a transcendent sound and knowledge that even though we’re all screwed, at least we have the power to accept it — and can choose to suck it up — or wither and fade. “You can suck out the blood / But you can’t kill the heart of my love,” McBean croons almost tenderly on “Vampire,” not entirely ironically, somehow managing to be sincere and chillingly heartbreaking.

Outside Love’s choraled vocals, with McBean as the preacher in the worn-out suit, sweetly propel songs thick with the languid haze of numbness. Acrid guitars, West Coast pop percussion, and meandering pedal steel thickly lay on the gospel according to McBean — who’s gone and traded his Bible for a Danielle Steel novel.

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