Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra - Kollaps Tradixionales
Rating
RIYL
Set Fire To FlamesGodspeed You! Black Emperor
HṚṢṬA
Yndi Halda
Release Date
02/16/2010
Label
Constellation RecordsTracklist
1. There Is A Light2. I Built Myself A Metal Bird
3. I Fed My Metal Bird The Wings Of Other Metal Birds
4. Kollapz Tradixional (Thee Olde Dirty Flag)
5. Collapse Traditional (For Darling)
6. Kollaps Tradicional (Bury 3 Dynamos)
7. Piphany Rambler
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After extensively touring to promote 2008’s 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons, Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra have dropped the “& Tra-La-La Band” from the tail end of their ever-changing moniker, along with three members, while recruiting another (drummer David Payant). Along with the notable name change comes Kollaps Tradixionales, the sixth studio album from these influential Montreal, Canada “post-rockers”.
As with all Silver Mount Zion recordings following the bands primarily instrumental debut, Kollaps Tradixionales is weighted heavily upon SMZ founder Efrim Menuck’s signature quaking, discordant vocals. However, Kollaps Tradixionales treads deeply with major improvements in Menuck’s vocal capabilities; his shrill yelps are no longer as prominently featured and instead are replaced with relatively in tune singing, while retaining the warm sincerity and cathartic qualities heard on previous works.
With newly refined vocals impacting the band's brand of raw and frazzled post-rock now more than ever, Thee Silver Mount Zion presses on in their journey to create a unique hybrid of punk, blues, psych, folk and modern orchestral idioms. Musically, Kollaps Tradixionales finds Silver Mount Zion straying greatly from their strictly ambient instrumental selves found on He Has Left Us Alone… Instead they delve deeply into heavily dynamic-oriented song structures that incorporate both the eloquently sculpted blues / modern classical-esque infusion of melodies, and the jaggedly cutthroat qualities that easily set SMZ apart from their contemporaries. “There Is Light”, for example, takes the listener on this very pathway that seems to offer up a brisk walk through an atmospheric range of melancholic electric guitars, strings, and drums. Continue on through Kollaps Tradixionales, however, and you’ll find that SMZ have tossed dizzying twists and turns into the mix to quicken the pace almost effortlessly by incorporating frenetic guitars, feverish percussion, and a vivacious string section to accelerate the heart rate. Once the blood gets good and flowing, the ferocity begins to die down again giving the listener an opportune moment to catch his breath – though, only temporarily – before being whisked away once again by the same technique found on “There Is Light”.
What makes the terrifyingly boisterous and beautifully devastating “I Built Myself A Metal Bird” so fascinating is the simple fact that it is without a doubt the most powerful and diverse song, musically, that SMZ have created to date. As Menuck’s calloused vocals soar in with an opening chant of, “I built myself a metal bird / I fed my metal bird the wings of other metal birds,” the rest of the band trudges on. By intertwining heavily distorted guitars with the punk attitude of “fuck conformity, I’ll do something different”, and an abundance of charming strings, Thee Silver Mount Zion manage to create something unheard of on previous works – bedlam. And though the song in itself may not be the epitome of what the Ramones helped to establish in the mid 1970’s, “…Metal Bird” most certainly accentuates the ‘thumb-your-nose-at-the-world’ mentality through innovation and not paying heed to the voice of reason.
Spanning a decade's worth of performing under the lose moniker of Silver Mount Zion, the band continues to evolve through reinvention. The boundaries of their post-rock rooting in the seminal Godspeed You! Black Emperor (indefinite hiatus) continue to blur and transform, taking shape and refuge in the raw; the melancholic; the noisy; the harmonic; the intense; the abnormal; the innovative. Kollaps Tradixionales: a truly appropriate title.
--Daniel Alcinii
Comments
San Diego, CA
Great review, I'm excited to check this out
Too old to bother, too young to give a shit.
Minnesota
I like these guys... sort of. They have yet to put out an album where I like the majority of the stuff on it. I'm wondering if this will be any different.
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