13 BluesIn the age of consumer choice, I always had trouble playing favourites, finding it difficult to settle on one drink, one brand, one football star, as time and marketing departments kept upturning the tables of my ordered universe. With music, things were simpler – I had Godspeed You! Black Emperor. In an age where a band’s rise is inseparable from the backlash that accompanies it, people forget how perfect GY!BE seemed when they first appeared, how vital their grainy, apocalyptic catharsis sounded. Admittedly, I was particularly ripe for their music: young, emotional, in the thrall of far-left politics and the tension and release of post-rock, listening to F#A#∞, their 1998 debut, I felt like I was hearing music for the first time. Pairing a kind of romantic anarchist disaffection with the raw, gut-busting bombast of a Branca symphony, a gift for sustained crescendo with a feel for the slow-burn, the Canadian collective managed to pick up the detritus of the world and meld it into something truly beautiful, moving even, the inevitability of their music somehow eased by the sheer sweep and range of it. Abandoning songs for long movements scrawled on cardboard, GY!BE was, in the beginning at least, a collective in the truest sense, a faceless, true-hearted bunch content to let their melted strings, screwdrivered guitars and ranting crazies do the talking. Then, after two rich LPs and one jaw-dropping EP, Godspeed made their first misstep, the strangely stilted Yanqui XYO. The record’s blandness, its beating of the same drum, wasn’t helped by the emerging legion of disaffected, emotional kids the collective had inspired. Soon enough, the band’s once-signature mix of grit and symphony had become usurped by an increasingly crowded field of Caucasian post-rock. The inevitable backlash ensued, and the mysterious group did what bands do when they don’t break up, and went on indefinite hiatus.
Two years before GY!BE began to fade from view, Efrum Menuck, the notoriously publicity-averse band’s most recognizable figure, struck out with his GY!BE-in-miniature project A Silver Mt. Zion, featuring a much smaller band and a palette to match. On their first record, the still-wonderful He Has Left Us Alone but Sometimes Shards of Light Grace the Corners of Our Rooms, Menuck and fellow GY!BE refugees Sophie Trudeau and Thierry Amar distilled the bigger band’s gift for imbuing the inevitability of the tension/release dynamic with grace and subtlety into littler, even prettier songs, their sparseness a welcome relief from the swarm of GY!BE. Three years later, when it seemed clear that GY!BE were done, A Silver Mt. Zion became the full-time gig of an increasing number of the collective’s members, and the object of the many GY!BE tragics’ passions. With each passing LP, A Silver Mt. Zion seem to get closer in size to the band it was spawned from – with a ridiculous, ever-changing name to match – and less and less capable of capturing their old band’s alchemy, depth or range. More and more, their records seem like exercises in diminishing returns, not so much straying from what made them great as having lost it somewhere along the way. Menuck, who once seemed so at pains to make himself invisible, is now all over the records, his wayward yelling a feature of every lengthy track the band puts out. With his voice the centre of every song, the range of the band behind seems to have narrowed in direct proportion, and a frustrating sameness now plagues each track. The band’s experiments with songform are an uneasy fit for their fifteen-minute compositions, and the results hang uneasily somewhere between the movements of old and the strangled protest songs they seem to want to create.
Menuck and Co. are still angry, still resigned, remarking on the pretty shapes the flames make when everything burns. But with 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons, they seem finally incapable of translating this feeling into anything resembling compelling music. As an emotion, it seems, resignation can be exhausted pretty easily. And then what? Then comes more yelling, at us, at everyone, but yelling still tethered so strongly to the feeling nothing will ever change you get the sense after a while that you’re being harangued, attacked by someone whose anger has finally turned on itself. When, during the record’s 1st proper piece (the record begins with 12 incidental five second tracks) ‘1,000,000 Died to Make This Sound,’ Menuck sings, ‘your band/your bland/your band is bland’ you really begin to wonder where the inspiration has gone. Are these the same people responsible for ‘Providence’ and ‘Moya’? When the yelling stops, the band is still capable of making a beautiful racket, the cello-and-riff-led breakdown of ‘1,000,000 Died To Make This Sound’ a welcome relief from the unending tuneless vocals, the slow build of the closer ‘Blindblindblind’ at first sounding like the weary, sepia-hued march of old. But as the momentum gives way to some plucked strings and more of Menuck’s ceaseless yelling, you start to realize that even the dynamic is gone, the build and mood now sunk in a foundation so heavy and lightless that you wonder if the spark and nuance that once made them so special might ever make it back out from the murk.
On ‘Black Waters Blowed/Engine Broke Blues’, the record’s penultimate track, as Menuck repeats ‘building trainwrecks/in the setting sun’ over and over again, he sounds, finally, like a record stuck in a groove, a man whose one trick, great though it once was, has finally worn itself out.
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band/13 Blues For Thirteen Moons - Constellation/Alive.
