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PO: Silver Mt. Zion - Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything


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Yup.

 

http://cstrecords.com/new-release-thee-silver-mt-zion-memorial-orchestra-fuck-off-get-free-we-pour-light-on-everything/

 

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Here’s the first of our new releases for January 2014: Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything, the first new full-length from Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra since 2010’s Kollapse Tradixionales. It’ll be available in stores as of January 21. See below for info, including an excerpt from album track “Austerity Blues” and a video made by the band for the occasion, or go to our release page for the full run-down. The band will be hitting the road for a good chunk of the late winter and early spring, with several weeks of shows in Europe and North America. See below for the first batch of dates (check back soon as we firm up the full picture).

 

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra (SMZ) has traced a barbed-wire arc of genre-defying protest music since its inception in 1999. Formed by Efrim Menuck, with Thierry Amar and Sophie Trudeau, the initial iteration of the band was a predominantly instrumental trio that forged a more intimate and ragged chamber-punk than Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the other group in which all three founding SMZ members also played (and continue to play). Through seven albums from 2000-2010, SMZ expanded its line-up and shifted towards an increasing use of lead and group vocals, with Menuck penning politically-charged lyrics to anchor long-form multi-movement compositions that juxtaposed electrified guitars against a 4-piece string section of violins, cello and contrabass.

Most recently, SMZ has pared back to five players, with Menuck’s massive spectrum-spanning electric guitar sound emerging as the spine around which two violins, bass (now more often electric than acoustic) and drums are deployed. SMZ have managed a handful of short tours in the past couple of years (in the gaps between GYBE commitments) and as anyone who has seen the band in its recent incarnation can attest, their current sound is more honed, laser-guided and bone-rattling than ever, melding hardcore, blues, garage and dark metal influences that have nothing to do with anything so quaint as “post-rock” (a tag the group has always and rightly rejected).

 

Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything is the first definitive document of the band’s newfound sound and style as a quintet. It’s also their first single LP-length work since the band’s debut record as a trio almost 15 years ago, and features road-tested pummeling rock-outs “Fuck Off Get Free (For The Island Of Montréal)”, “Take Away These Early Grave Blues” and “What We Loved Was Not Enough” alongside the previously unheard lullabyes/minuets “Little Ones Run” and “Rains Thru The Roof At Thee Grande Ballroom (For Capital Steeze)” and the album centerpiece “Austerity Blues” with its closing lyric “Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down” sung in varying incarnations throughout the second half of this 14-minute epic.

This lyric in many ways encapsulates Menuck’s unflinching take on a world replete with shabbiness, greed and injustice, seen through the lens of parenthood, mortality, endurance and defiance. There are few other musicians who deliver social critique with the courage and honesty of lines like “All our cities gonna burn / All our bridges gonna snap / All our pennies gonna rot / Lightning roll across our tracks / All our children gonna die”. Feel-good music this is not; but neither can it reductively be tagged apocalyptic or world-weary. Fuck Off Get Free rages with scorn and with hope, utterly passionate but pointedly unromantic. Thee Silver Mt. Zion once again demonstrates, like few other bands working today, that there is much to fight for and against, and plenty more fight songs to sing.

Thanks for listening.

 

 

  1. FUCK OFF GET FREE (FOR THE ISLAND OF MONTREAL)
  2. AUSTERITY BLUES
  3. TAKE AWAY THESE EARLY GRAVE BLUES
  4. LITTLE ONES RUN
  5. WHAT WE LOVED WAS NOT ENOUGH
  6. RAINS THRU THE ROOF AT THEE GRANDE BALLROOM (FOR CAPITAL STEEZ)
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This should be interesting...a guaranteed winner when the album title contains F

 

...January is going to be a good month for post-rock albums...

 

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I don't know why, but i just get all giddy inside and sometimes LOL when reading about bands labeled as "post rock," who get all exercised and accost the term, or make like it's being pariah of the worst magnitude.  But they'd probably be cool with being labeled "copro-lite"

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I don't know why, but i just get all giddy inside and sometimes LOL when reading about bands labeled as "post rock," who get all exercised and accost the term, or make like it's being pariah of the worst magnitude.  But they'd probably be cool with being labeled "copro-lite"

 

I think that's pretty funny, too, actually.  Obviously "post-rock" has become such an umbrella-genre; the catch-all for anything that's instrumental and longer than your typical chart topper.  I use it pretty loosely, and I never assume that I know what sound someone is trying to describe when they throw that term down.  But the artists who get bent out of shape over that label are hilarious.  Mogwai - arguably one of the defining bands for the genre - still insist that they're anything but it.  They constantly refer to their music, explicitly, as not "post-rock".  But when you've been a band since the 90s, and 95% of your fanbase has given (and continues to give) you a label... at that point, why bother fighting it?

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I think that's pretty funny, too, actually.  Obviously "post-rock" has become such an umbrella-genre; the catch-all for anything that's instrumental and longer than your typical chart topper.  I use it pretty loosely, and I never assume that I know what sound someone is trying to describe when they throw that term down.  But the artists who get bent out of shape over that label are hilarious.  Mogwai - arguably one of the defining bands for the genre - still insist that they're anything but it.  They constantly refer to their music, explicitly, as not "post-rock".  But when you've been a band since the 90s, and 95% of your fanbase has given (and continues to give) you a label... at that point, why bother fighting it?

Mogwai are one of the bands that I don't understand getting called post rock at all. I agree with them that they are a just a (mostly) instrumental "rock" band. I'm a huge fan of Godspeed and such but Mogwai fit nowhere in that group imo. The whole term confuses me, as I have probably expressed before.

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I use post-rock really loosely, mainly out of laziness.  It's about as big of an umbrella term is metal is, covers a lot.  I do find it amusing that some bands are so adamant about not being classified as genre X, but I can imagine having your work so easily categorized could be frustrating.  But, it's human nature to try and classify everything (hence some of the more obnoxious sub-genres we have these days).

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the simplest definition of post rock is simply a band that uses typically considered rock instruments to create music other than typical rock. it does not mean caspian or explosions in the sky loud/soft atmospheric blah blah blah. so by that definition it makes sense to categorize these bands into post rock. but who cares.

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