Nu Rave Brain Wave

The bearded gentleman you see above is Stephen McBean of Black Mountain and side project Pink Mountaintops. Pink Mountaintops’ newest album Outside Love has been on heavy rotation for me for awhile now; simply put, it’s beautiful. The grittiness of the previous albums is stripped away to let those huge harmonies shine through. On record, songs like “Axis: Thrones of Love”, title track “Outside Love”, and “Execution” sound nearly symphonic. But on Tuesday evening, even through my gin-soaked haze, I could tell that lush sound just didn’t translate to the stage. This is probably not at the fault of either the band or the venue, but something just seemed a bit off. Maybe it was simply because they lacked the man/woman-power; after all, there are 21 musicians credited on their album and there could not have been more than 7 on stage. So although it was not the ethereal musical experience I was hoping for, Pink Mountaintops still put on an impressive performance to a packed Echo. Xu Xu Fang opened the show with the sparest of their many incarnations, numbering only 6 members as opposed to their usual 10 or 11. In true Fang fashion, the stage was foggy, the music dark and atmospheric. I still can’t completely pin down their musical style or easily pigeonhole them into a genre or sub-genre or sub-sub-genre, and something tells me they’d like that. I caught a few songs from The Pack A.D. and I will just echo the words of somebody else who was present: “They sound like a female Restavrant”. Not a bad thing by any means, but perhaps a bit ill-fitting in this lineup. But all in all, a great Tuesday night at The Echo.