A Silver Mt. Zion - He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms
(Constellation)
The goal is to get through this review without resorting to cheap
comparisons to Godspeed, You Black Emperor!, the legion of musicians from
which the three who comprise A Silver Mt. Zion are culled. I fully expect
to fail, and to fail quickly.
The problem with avoiding comparisons, really, is in the opening track.
Actually, the problem appears first in the external qualities of the tracks
themselves. There are so many questions: how many tracks are there? Two?
Two with eight sub-tracks? Eight? One? Who the hell knows? And why do
the time lengths listed on the inside cover not correspond with the readout
on the cd player. Are they trying to trick me? Are they laughing at me
right now? And what the hell is a silver Mt. Zion and who has left us
alone? Its just too damned arty-farty to figure out.
Anyway, the first segment of music is a simple and plaintive piano piece,
which, as the melody cycles, becomes louder and more complex. Then you
have a recorded radio voice reciting and expositing on Bible versus,
layered on top of itself, which is finally combined with a mournful violin.
What is the difference between this and GYBE? Well, there are about one
thousand less musicians in A Silver Mt. Zion. That's about all I have come
up with so far.
Then you have the second chunk of music, which drops the voice and piano,
but picks up some drums to propel the violin melody out of the mournful and
into a more impassioned tempo. The repetition, the slow burn, the scaling
up of intensity never quite reaches the fevered pitch of ecstasy and
madness which makes GBYE so cathartic (maybe that's the difference, A
Silver Mt. Zion is the laidback version of GBYE). Its subtler but retains
the passion.
The remainder of the album essentially follows this same pattern. That is
not to say the songs are necessarily repetitious of each other or to accuse
the musicians of being proverbial "one-trick ponies." But, as with GYBE,
each record seems to be comprised of one big, unified piece (no matter how
many crazily named segments they try and trick me into thinking there are).
Thus, there is a unifying strand, originating in the first segment, which
weaves its way through the two songs or eight tracks or forty-seven minutes
of this record. To keep things fresh, organs, upright bass, and guitar are all
thrown into the mix.
Structurally, the album is as interesting as it is musically. The first
half builds towards a crescendo but is cut short by the fourth track, a
bizarre piano ballad, sung in a pained voice, which resets the intensity
meter for the remainder of the album. The minor psychosis of the first
half of the album breaks and gives way to a sadness captured perfectly in
the piano, violin, bowed upright bass combination on the final track.
Like other releases that these musicians have contributed to in GYBE, He
Has Left Us . . . is a fascinating piece of music produced by a talented
group of artists who deserve to sell millions of records. So get to work,
people!
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