Seeking Revelations With An Electric Guitar
Kollaps Tradixionales
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra
Constellation Records
Three and a half stars
Gospel and the blues grapple with the same troubles, the one with hope and the other with despair. Some kind of hell-fire smoulders around these new songs from the latest version of Montreal's Silver Mt. Zion (SMZ), but the band does not hang its head. There is a light out there somewhere, they insist, and they keep on playing and singing till it appears.
The album begins with a slow, hymn-like melody that moves quietly through guitars and strings and Efrim Menuck's barely audible vocals, then gradually builds into a roaring wave of sound that is clearly intended to carry us to the other shore. This cathartic, overcoming progress happens again and again on this album, sometimes more than once in a single song.
"There's trumpets in heaven, six feet underground / mighty and muddy, they faintly resound," Menuck sings. SMZ's lyrics are both visionary and caked with the dust of ordinary experience. If there's revelation to be found here, it's messy and abundant, though the path toward its uncovering always begins with a plain sturdy tune, like something discovered in an old songbook or hymnal.
The slow build takes time; the first and last of the seven songs take a quarter-hour to play. Others spill into each other: two songs about a metal bird share some of the same music, and three other songs are linked by more than their varied spellings of the album's title. But everything on the disc is only as long as it needs to be. SMZ keeps it interesting by continually varying the arrangement, the density of sound, the counterpoint of instruments, and the meter, which often comes together from an almost arrhythmic miasma.
In I Fed My Metal Bird the Wings of Other Metal Birds, the voices sing in four, while the instruments play in seven. At the opening of 'Piphany Rambler, the music seems to pause in contemplation after each recurrence of a four-beat string progression, though as the music fills in, we realize that it was always following a nine-beat phrase length.
The epiphanic program of this grand rock-gospel orchestral music is somewhat reminiscent of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, another Montreal group that Menuck helped found. But there are many rooms in the father's house, and these ones are well worth visiting.