It's doubtful that Stephen McBean set out to make The Great Rock 'N' Roll Primer when he started conjuring the songs that would come to be Pink Mountaintops' Get Back.

The record's beginnings were reasonably straightforward: McBean had moved to Los Angeles, taken a long hiatus from Black Mountain and an even longer one from Pink Mountaintops when he met producer Joe Cardamone, lead singer of Icarus Line at Valley Recording Company in Burbank, CA. The two bonded quickly over Flying Nun bands, Television Personalities, Roxy Music, Johnny Thunders, and Born Against. Joe was excited to meet someone he actually liked. Stephen was excited to work with someone who said "Sing it like you would've sung it when you were 21." Simple enough, right?

But ask him to set the scene and you'll hear about a motorcycle shop owned by Michael Barragan, former member of Los Angeles noise rock band Plexi. You'll hear about an endless supply of rock 'n' roll video documentation for last minute inspiration or deevolution in the living room. Ask who's on the record and you'll get a constellation of greats: J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr & Witch), Rob Barbato (Darker My Love, The Fall & Cass McCombs), Steve Kille (Dead Meadow), Daniel Allaire (Brian Jonestown Massacre, Cass McCombs & Darker My Love), Annie Hardy (Giant Drag), Jon Wahl (Clawhammer), and Gregg Foreman (Cat Power & Delta 72). Randal Dunn (SunnO))), Earth, Sun City Girls, Boris) mixed Get Back at Avast! Studios (Bikini Kill, Mudhoney, Christ On A Crutch, Soundgarden) in Seattle. Howie Weinburg (Nirvana, Beastie Boys, Danzig, Ramones, Slayer) mastered it in Laurel Canyon.

Ask about the record itself and McBean will tell you about "Alleys, curbs, walls, and cigarette stained gig flyers. An island on the Pacific coast. Fake British towns. Slayer posters. The beauty of youth. It's about listening to Driver's Seat and 'Guns of Brixton' and hotboxing The Duster." And suddenly it becomes clear: when the aliens do touch down and they don't know rock 'n' roll, you can play them Get Back start to finish, and that'll be all they need.

Get Back comes out swinging with "Ambulance City," a head-trip of a song with a chugging, insistent, oddly timeless guitar riff sitting front and center. "The Second Summer of Love" needs almost no explanation; it dives into 80s VHS saturation and never comes up for air. "Sell Your Soul" is a deep sigh and a motorcycle ride, a roll in the grass lamenting summertime blues with a little grit and a little harmony. And "North Hollywood Microwaves" is downright obscene. But what better way to start Side B than this? You can listen at hushed volumes so your parents don't hear, you can crank it in a dorm room, you can smirk to yourself from the safety of rock 'n' roll's old age. You start to wonder - why don't all Side Bs start with a song like this one...

The number of platitudes in music hit critical mass years ago, and among those tropes is that annoying, inescapable mantra: rock 'n' roll is undefinable. And yeah, sure, that's true. It's different things to different people. It starts with guitars, maybe, and ends with a stage-dive, or spit, or feedback. Rock 'n' roll is drugs, is rebellion, is youth, is sex, is cosmic. It's wanting more than you have. Rock 'n' roll is butts and cigarette butts. And Pink Mountaintops might not be the best-known band ever to make rock 'n' roll, but in Get Back they just might have written its scripture -- an exploration and celebration of what, exactly, rock 'n' roll can be.

"Outside Love" is ten songs of love and hate that read like a Danielle Steele romance novel but that would probably make for bad television. "Outside Love" is the third album by Pink Mountaintops, AKA Stephen McBean, who has slowly emerged as a distinctive voice and a very special contributor to the North American songbook. A veteran of the Vancouver/Victoria punk rock scene, McBean is best known for his contributions to acclaimed rock band Black Mountain, as principal songwriter, guitarist and co-vocalist. The ten songs on "Outside Love" are about or influenced by weddings in Montreal, winter, Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut", Christmas albums, that one Exile song and that one Echo and the Bunnymen song, the Bermuda Triangle, being depressed in the sunshine, people who haven't made out yet but will in the future, The Everly Brothers, clowns in the ceilings, and bedrooms where skinheads used to live. The album features contributions from members of A Silver Mt. Zion, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Destroyer, Jesse Sykes, Sunn 0))), Whiskeytown, Jackie O Motherf**ker, The Organ, Black Mountain, Lightning Dust, Superconductor and many more. Mixed by John Congleton (Modest Mouse, Explosions In The Sky and many others).

Stephen McBean has been in numerous groups over the last two decades including most recently of course, Black Mountain. With "Axis Of Evol", his current project, Pink Mountaintops' second full-length record, McBean has once again created something much greater than the sum of his influences. It begins with a forboding spiritual called "Comas", the kind that McBean and only a very few other songwriters of this generation could pull off. It includes the tone-setting lyrical phrase 'I have been wrestling a dead angry deer, and she is still with me after all of these years'. The record then almost immediately ramps up into a thumping, buzzing, blissful haze, at various parts sounding like the Velvet Underground or Spacemen 3 or the Jesus And Mary Chain circa "Psycho Candy". And at the end, the album then segues into a hypnotic, Smog-like meditation called "How We Can Get Free". Throughout the record, McBean sings about love and war, the love of war, and the war of love; on the body, on the mind and on the soul.