Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra

Kollaps Tradixionales (Constellations, 02.2010)

For: Godspeed!, Led Zepelin, Evangelista

Byline: Seven tracks of blues-inspired balladry that range in tone from terrifying to triumphant. Efrim Menuck and Co.’s sixth album finds a workable mixture of the older neo-classical post-rock and recent classic rock leanings. Originally published on www.inyourspeakers.com. Used by permission from In Your Speakers, LLC.

After close to ten years as the de facto frontman of arguably one of the best rock and roll bands ever, followed by another decade as the reluctant frontman for Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra*, Efrim Menuck’s devastatingly wide-eyed observations of society from its periphery have cut an indelible impression into the indie rock landscape. On his latest offering Menuck and Co. continue their evolution from neo-classical, traditional Jewish folk-inspired compositions to the vocal-centric blues and classic rock marriage of their earlier art-folk leanings with powerful wall-of-noise anthems. Kollaps Tradixionales is Silver Mt. Zion’s sixth album and is their strongest since 2001’s Born Into Trouble As Sparks Fly Upward. The new decade finds the newly reformatted quintet at their most visceral, their most paranoid, and ultimately their most hopeful.

Silver Mt. Zion has the uncanny ability to wrap dreadful foreboding with a sense of hope, found in concepts of communalism and humanity. Menuck balances these contrasting ideas of dread and hope by drawing on his own sense of spiritual communion with a close-knit Jewish community and the perennial pessimism of the life of an outsider in contemporary Kanadian culture. Kollaps Tradioxionales’ emotional impact, while hardly the manufactured catharsis of post-rock, is nuanced to say the least, making me rethink my claim that this is Silver Mt. Zion at their most hopeful. The album is structured with two lengthy tracks bookending two loud rock songs and a loosely-held-together suite.

Tradioxionales starts with what is arguably one Mt. Zion’s most anthemic and triumphant songs to date. Clocking in at a little over fifteen minutes, “There is a Light” is remarkably live sounding. The sound of an electric guitar being plugged into an amp starts the song before a mournful single guitar pierces the wall of static while a refugee church organ shudders to life in the background. Menuck’s haggard, frazzled voice follows his guitar’s inflection like a shuffling funeral procession. The track peaks with huge, swelling crescendos and bottoms out in dirge-like, post-classical breakdowns of horns, saxophones, and strings, only to climb again in unhinged climaxes. Menuck counterpoints the triumphant middle-point of the song by delivering one of his most overwhelming lines yet, “There ain’t no truth/but the no truth, but the not truth/ yeah!/ There ain’t no thing/but the nothing, but the nothing/ yeah!” Being recorded live, Efrim’s vocal chords begin to wear out after his twelve plus minutes of screaming at the top of his lungs in an evangelistic revelry. By end of the track they sound haggard and grating, the heavy breathing of a televangelist.

Following “There is a Light,” the beguilingly titled “I Built Myself a Metal Bird” and by “I Fed My Metal Bird the Wings of Other Metal Birds” come charging out of the gates with disorienting 7/4 time signatures and downright punk swagger. Silver Mt. Zion has always claimed that bands like Black Flag and Minutemen helped define their sonic palate, and with the release of this longtime crowd favorite they finally wear their influences on their sleeve.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion is a difficult band to love, the stylistic whiplash between Zepelin guitar excesses, traditional Eastern European folk music, and neo-classical segues of atonal guitar and cello is often overwhelming. Ultimately though, Silver Mt. Zion produces beautiful music. It is the type of beauty that can encompass the most glorious anthems set to lilting violins and thunderous drums. Bleak tales of lost hope and the abandoned vestiges of society. Kollaps Tradixionales is a diasporic outgrowth of love and terror, of fear and rebirth.

*Also known as: A Silver Mt. Zion, The Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band with Choir, and Thee Silver Mountain Reveries.

Ryan H.

See full review at: www.inyourspeakers.com

Not exactly an official music video but someone orchestrated scenes from Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point to "I Built Myself A Metal Bird". Pretty rad.

Evangelista

Prince of Truth (10.09, Constellations)

For: Lou Reed, Hanne Hukkelberg + Crowspath, Ben Frost

Byline: Carla Bozulich’s songs are compositional nightmarescapes of haunted Americana, clanging noise rock, and elegant chamber music heavier than anything you have heard this year. Originally posted on www.inyourspeakers.com. Used by permission from In Your Speakers, LLC.

When we talk about “heavy” music what do we mean? Does “heavy” hold some sort of metaphysical weight that exists outside of the composition like genre, band members, volume, etc.? In considering what most people associate with heavy— metal, black clothes, long hair, ear-destroying walls of amps—dark imagery plays an integral role. Most people wouldn’t consider classical music heavy in that definition, right? If we strip “heavy” of its connotative trappings and look at a piece in terms of mood and compositional arrangement, then we get a very different definition. A track is heavy because it traps you under the weight of what you feel, the emotion that it conveys. Lou Reed? Heavy. Ben Frost? Brutal. Nick Cave? Whoa. Evangelista? The most freakin’ metal album I have heard all year.

Prince of Truth is a revelation. Evangelista lives comfortably inside the dark impasses that fellow Constellations labelmates only flirted with in their most tortured post-rock soundscapes. Carla Bozulich’s songs are compositional nightmarescapes of haunted Americana, clanging noise rock and elegant chamber music. The songs themselves are compositionally impossible, assembling a broad swath of musicians from Montreal mainstays to Xiu Xiu’s / Congs for Brums percussion master Chess Smith to new Wilco member Nels Cline (!); it takes a group of musicians this talented to totally dismantle song compositions with such grace and force. It is Bozulich’s post-gothic purr-to-howl that ties all the disparate elements into a dark passage of a jarring, ferocious cacophony.

“The Slayer” opens with some Metal Machine Music swirls of distortion drenched guitars and a churning sea of discordant melodies until Bozulich’s gothic, otherworldly voice announces, “This is the speed of light…The angels walk below / slicing metal by remote control”. Yes! Let’s see Danzig write something that unabashedly terrifying or hear him deliver it with such creepy detachment. Amazingly, “The Slayer” is pulled together with a melodic chorus. This is one of my favorite moments on the album, partly because, oddly enough, Bozulich sounds a lot like Ian MacKaye of Fugazi. It is uncanny; she even nails the breathless pant of MacKaye at his most accusatory. This is, of course, Fugazi on a dangerously high level of codeine.

“I Lay There in Front of Me Covered In Ice” is a sprawling Americana ballad in the key of Nick Cave. It is a coy little piece that never fully reveals its teeth until long after the fact. “Iris Didn’t Spell” is the most compositionally complex, featuring a minute and a half organ, strings, and drum segue that turns any sort of traditional composition on its ear. “Darkness falls / the stars explode /but they don’t die, they just can’t be together” is stated with such a resigned sense of fatalism you can feel the weight of the words even if you can’t decipher their meaning. That goes for most of Bozulich’s songwriting— each line is conveyed with such sincerity and dread that a interpretation isn’t needed. The lyrics push along the mournful dirge, and not vice-versa.

This brings me to the centerpiece of the album, “You Are Jaguar,” the most accessible and darkest track, and, truthfully, one of 2009’s best slices of music. A pop-apocalyptic burner, in which Bozulich’s voice is forced to its most heroic, standing on top of the stage lights screaming “You are a Jaguar! / In Catacombs / In racecars! / Of my love in feathers!” Let the wild rumpus of guitar freak-outs start! This is jaw dropping stuff here.

Prince of Truth can and should be compared favorably to Ben Frost’s critically lauded By The Throat as a vocal/spoken word addendum. They share a similar compositional weight in both theme and substance: heavier than Dokken, heavier than Dio, heavier than Priest, man.

Ryan H.

Evangelista myspace

Do Make Say Think

The Other Truths (Constellations, 10.09)

For: A Silver Mt. Zion, Valley of the Giants, Lymbyc Systym

Byline:A glorious soundscape of hope, lament, and near-religious revelry from decade-old Canadian post-rock legends. Originally Published on www.inyourspeakers.com. Used by permission from In Your Speakers LLC.

Approaching Post-Rock with a strictly critical eye is tricky for me. As a whole, I have felt the six full-length albums of Do Make Say Think more than I have actively listened to them. The band has a way of crafting slow-building songs centered around several separate instrumental movements that coalesce in a crescendo that borders on religious catharsis. There is a rapturous, glorious, quasi-spiritual movement through the entire Do Make Say Think catalog. Returning two years after releasing their greatest album to date, You You are a History in Rust, Do Make Say Think stick largely to the script, sculpting textured sonic landscapes of hope-filled power chords, heralding trumpets and a patience that lets the songs build up to their absolute breaking point, then selling it all on an incredible climax.

With each successive release there is an aspect that sets a new Do Make Say Think album apart from its predecessor. For example, their self-titled debut is by far the most jazz/dub influenced album they have released; Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord is Dead saw the introduction of a ruddy baritone saxophone; You You are a History in Rust saw the introduction of vocals, etc. Now, ten years later, their sixth release, Other Truths is largely an extension and a culmination of those themes. The album consists of four tracks, titled simply: “Do,” “Make,” “Say,” and “Think.” Three of these clock in at over ten minutes. The first track “Do” is by far the most hurried and straightforward track they have ever produced. It seems like a stark departure for a band that lets songs build slowly for seven or eight minutes until things really start getting heavy. The song starts with a simple guitar line that is repeated throughout the entire song before a slightly more distorted riff is piled on top, something like mid-tempo Mogwai. These lines are repeated until Do Make Say Think’s celebrated polyrhythmic, dual-drumming frenzy guides the track at a breakneck pace for the next six minutes. A few breakdowns are conservatively placed, but the track is propelled heavenward by a furious backbeat courtesy of drummers Dave Mitchell and James Payment.

“Make” is a classic Do Make Say Think slow burner. Starting with an ominous guitar line, the drums roll over their beats like they were stumbling home drunk. Each step has an awkward extra half step or slight hiccup before slowly building into a tribal backbeat as surging synths build from deep beneath the audible surface. Vocals from the Akron/Family chant in a strange mixture of Yiddish lullaby/Avett Brothers vocal harmonies. The track is most reminiscent of fellow Canadian post-rock bands A Silver Mt. Zion and, Charles Spearin side project, Valley of the Giants. “Make” is the first track on the album to showcase their seriously beefed up horn and woodwind section, which announce themselves in bombastic bursts of ecstatic revelry that drive the song into the most dizzyingly climactic crescendos.

The timing on this album is impeccable. After a straight-up barn burner of an ending on “Make,” “Say” is introduced as a type of Edward Burtynsky photograph or Akira Kurosawa film; while it is easy to get lost in the grandeur of the whole, each detail emerges slowly with repeated viewings/listenings. “Say” is by far the most instrumentally complex track, full of twisting peaks and valleys, several song arcs, tempo shifts and acoustic break downs. The song is largely held together by a type of floor-staring somberness of eight musicians locked in an elegiac communion with the infinite. Somber horns bleat out like a dirge while all acoustic instruments (guitars, banjos, slide guitars) are bowed and bent like drooping heads of wheat. Rising from the lament comes a chiding, hopeful braid of vocals by DMST side project Lullabye Arkestra. The last track “Think” is a fitting coda to the album, an eight-minute ode to the project these friends started ten years ago. Built around two guitars and drums, “Think” serves as rumination on the history of the band and, perhaps, the Canadian post-rock movement as a whole.

Other Truths as an album is much like Do Make Say Think as band—easy to love, harder to explain why. Albums like these are meant to be felt. Both self evident and cryptic, blissful and somber, cacophonous and restrained, Do Make Say Think do not show their hand on first listen. Several thorough listens and you get what they are doing, but nothing can replace that moment when the first swell and burst of sound penetrates you to the core. This album will destroy you.

Ryan H.

A blast from the past.