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Rating:
I don't know if Efrim Menuck's projects can have a significant importance in the history of music, but I don't really care. I'm interested in what they manage to convey to me, the long suites, dark, apocalyptic, epic by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the originality of Silver Mt. Zion, in which his off-key singing perfectly combines with violins and guitars with a neurotic pace. The stylistic influences of this project could be varied; I will simply list some elements that I notice based on my more or less habitual listening.
Several bands from the '90s had the peculiarity of associating opposite attitudes of Rock. An evident example was certainly Don Caballero, who combined a brainy style akin to Frippish guitar playing with an attitude balancing instinct and rationality typical of certain Post Hardcore. This middle ground of attitudes, clearly not the same as Ian Williams' band, I also find in this latest project of Efrim. His singing (again, just my impression) relatively reminds me of Rotten from Public Image Limited, and their music a kind of symphonic progression not very different from what King Crimson proposed in "Larks' Tongues In Aspic".
"Kollaps Tradixionales" partly reprises the style of the previous "13 Blues For Thirteen Moons", which, in my opinion, was one of the most successful works of Efrim and company. "There Is A Light" seems a more articulated continuation of "BlindBlindBlind" from the previous work. In the subsequent "I Built Myself a Metal Bird", they express their more "furious" side, their Punk Rock, as they stated in the title of a previous work. A sort of apocalyptic Folk of the third millennium, theirs, also shares something in common with Tibet's latest work "Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain".
Rather different styles characterize the work of these Canadians, but with the common feature of alternating calmer moments with instrumental fury, a sort of eclecticism that is music to my ears. Maybe I exaggerate in praising them, but there are few bands that manage to move me like these Montreal geniuses.
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