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Black Mountain - Year Zero OST

Quite what surfing has to do with resetting the calendar a la the Khmer Rouge is anyone’s guess but then equally I’d never before considered Black Mountain as being a particularly surf-oriented group so who knows. Whether the 10 songs here do amply soundtrack the film in question I can’t say, but as collections of 5 previously released songs and 5 new ones go it works pretty well. It has to be mentioned at this point though that I seem to only have 9 songs to write about. Maybe the tenth will turn up on the official releases.

Of those new songs on the Year Zero OST then ‘Phosphorescent Waves’, the album opener, starts off in similar fashion to the better examples of John Carpenter’s scores before moving on to resemble the work of Tangerine Dream – all very synth-driven and ethereal then. ‘Mary Lou’ delivers up the more riff-heavy fare I’d been expecting over around seven minutes or thereabouts. ‘Embrace Euphoria’ and ‘In Sequence’ opt for the Tangerine Dream angle again with the latter at least having a bit of humour and life towards its end. Closer ‘Breathe’ is a stoner-lite, acid flecked piece of campfire psych and none the worse off for it.

Having actually re-read the blurb attached to this it turns out Year Zero is a post-apocalyptic surf movie (the apocalypse seems to have killed off female surfers as the adrenalin junkies on show are all blokes). This isn’t Film 2012 though so I’ll leave off with that line of pursuit. However, positive association with the film or just as a collection completer are the only reasons you’d probably shell out for this.

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