Pink Mountaintops "Plastic Man, You're the Devil"

10 days into 2006, and we’ve got our first great protest song of the year. It’s a great one, called “Plastic Man, You’re the Devil” courtesy of Sam McBean’s (Black Mountain) side project Pink Mountaintops. It’s the second album from McBean’s home-recorded side project, following the eponymous first that featured one of my all-time favorite song titles, “I (Fuck) Mountains”. Like a good side project, Axis of Evol (I swear, another month or two, and I would have come up with that title) channels elements of its more refined relative, but packs enough difference to stake its own ground. Where the first PM album’s psych-funk-VU pastiche predicted what Black Mountain would sound like, Axis goes in a different direction, with seven mostly subdued songs of pensive nu-folk—think Bonnie and Smog. “Plastic Man” proves that McBean’s us-against-them motif persists—clearly directed at the most deserved-of-impeachment CommInChief of the past century—the song features the lyric that gives the album its name: “The Axis of Evol/Won’t smoke that shit you’re on”.

Axis of Evol drops 3/7. Read Jagjag’s amusing promo blurbage here, and dig another mp3.

Also courtesy of Jagjaguwar, “Can You Do That Dance?” (mp3), from the first one.