A Silver Mt. Zion
He Has Left Us Alone, but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace...

THE REVIEW

Like finding yourself in any corner of the world at any hour and inevitably feeling a poignant sense of melancholy...  
A Silver Mt Zion is probably the most well-known and prolific among the side projects of the Canadian group Godspeed You Black Emperor!, and perhaps also the most similar in musical approach to that of the parent band, although it repeatedly reveals a more pronounced intimacy. Apocalyptic scores, almost entirely instrumental, for a band-orchestra in this case with a reduced lineup, almost chamber-like one might say (in later albums it would increase the number of members), yet capable of creating emotional whirlwinds of heartrending beauty, simple in the repetition of a string theme and capable of pulling the listener along with its ascent to unthinkable heights (Sit in the Middle of Three Galloping Dogs).
And yet it is in descending, into the depths, that this music finds its most fitting and natural dimension, and here again is the same leading theme of the first part of this album, unraveling along a descending scale, continuing (Stumble Then Rise on Some Awkward Morning), towards indefinable places, leaving us in an unspecified silent and probably dark place (Movie, Never Made), where a quiet voice and music greet those arriving, speaking of cities in ruin, perhaps memories of a war fought or still being fought, just one like many, in short...  
13 Angels Standing Guard 'Round The Side Of Your Bed is a meeting of spirits and melancholy, almost a coda to the tale of the immediately preceding devastation, but the songs that follow have no different directions: "don't tell me that I am free, 'cause I have not been well, Lately" recites a voice in Blown Out Joy From Heaven's Mercied Hole, but it is an almost whisper-like sound, it is the task of the music to convey the same concept, reaffirming it, succeeding in a way remarkably more expressive than any word; violin strings and piano keys play at intersecting poignant sounds, here as already elsewhere, and as, again, in the masterful and concluding For Wanda.
But these are distant sounds, each in its own way, almost backgrounded, compared to the single, unvarying and constant protagonist of these expansive atmospheres: the resounding silence that envelops everything...