A Silver Mt. Zion
Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything

At the beginning of the millennium, A Silver Mt. Zion was simply a nascent creature, a child of the seminal Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Time passes, and the creature grows. From a small version of the parent band, it has become a beautiful, independent, and intelligent creature. A band on its own, grown and mature.

Efrim Menuck, the brilliant inventor of these two musical war machines, has once again put in maximum effort to demonstrate that A Silver Mt. Zion can also stand on its own without always being compared to GY!BE. Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything is the band's seventh album in fourteen years, and it is the most violent, the loudest, the most vocal, and also the most direct. Six solid tracks that are six powerful slaps in the face of today's world.

The first slap Efrim and his band give is to the city of Montreal, where he was born and raised. In the ten minutes of "Fuck Off Get Free (For The Island Of Montreal)", he bluntly states his resentment for the city, its inhabitants, and its transformation into something so gray and unlivable, with no holds barred. The initial strings are definitively swept away by overflowing guitars that break in halfway, sludge guitars that inject pain and despair into the ears, horror at the modern world. A definite "fuck off" to the capitalism that crushes and destroys us without giving us time to react and escape.

The second slap is "Austerity Blues", a cacophonous folk/progressive/drone drive of fourteen minutes where Efrim repeats a desperate mantra "Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down". An anthem to everything he, an anarchist musician, has always fought for. A battle for a better future, to prevent our planet from breaking beneath our feet and destroying itself forever.

These are slaps disguised as caresses that we encounter in the middle part of the record. "Take Away These Early Grave Blues" is an apocalyptic folk ballad, an infernal ballad with distorted and corrosive violins. It emerges like a droning version of the Dirty Three (God bless them). Efrim Menuck sings at the top of his lungs like never before, letting his words hit straight in the stomach, then rising to the heart and imprinting in the brain. "Let them sing our pretty songs," he says repeatedly. And that "them" is none other than the millions of children who are victims of climate change, wars, the continuous battles we adults create without thinking of the future, without thinking of those who have nothing to do with it.

The sweetness of the piano and the female voices in the short and sweet "Little Ones Run" is surprising, but there's little time for tranquility, little time to stop and reflect. "What We Loved Was Not Enough" is perhaps the easiest track, the one that stays in the mind the most, the one that deviates most from the classic GY!BE style sound. A slow rock ride that resembles a bastardized and rusty version of Arcade Fire from the good old days (personally, it brought back memories of the beautiful and successful "Neon Bible" from a few years ago). A slow rock song tainted by drones that scratch the bottom of our hearts and mix with an almost (and I stress "almost") positive melody. While the melody appears calm and sunny, the severity of the lyrics makes everything more bitter, never as catastrophic as in this long piece. “And the day has come, when we no longer feel," sings A Silver Mt. Zion in a harmonic but cursed choir.

In closing, "Rains Thru the Roof at the Grande Ballroom (For Capital Steez)" is a declaration of love for music. A singular, indelible hope of salvation. Music unites all, brings peace, brings happiness, brings love. Efrim Menuck dedicates the delicate final track to Capital Steez, a rapper who took his own life in 2012 by jumping from a New York building, a blunt outlier voice silenced too soon. Efrim Menuck leaves us listeners a suggestion for advancing his battle against capitalism, against the destruction of our world that we live on. Continue to listen to music.

The new album by A Silver Mt. Zion has indescribable power, the band's most accomplished. A testament to how the post-rock (or perhaps I should say post-post-rock) of Menuck and his crowd of musicians is the most authoritative around, the most disorienting, and the one that most shakes us from within. It awakens our sense of belonging to this world, ensuring that we can teach our children how to live and not just survive on this planet in disarray. Perhaps we should more often do as the title of this ambitious and spectacular record suggests. Fuck off. Get free. Pour light on everything.