Thirteen Bar Blues

As Godspeed You! Black Emperor continue to offer no signs of reanimation, A Silver Mt. Zion has developed from an unassuming side-project for completists to a fully autonomous entity. In the spirit of Godspeed’s migrating exclamation point, the Montreal collective has varied nominally over the course of their catalog. What was first a simple article change from A to Thee Silver Mt. Zion eventually swelled to Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band With Choir, partly, according to the band’s press release, to help rock journalists meet their word count obligations. Props on that one.

SMZ’s seventh release, 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons, is the first to offer no variance in nomenclature from the band’s previous work—they’re sticking with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band. But the stylistic shifts on 13 Blues eclipse the subtle additions SMZ have slowly acquired on past efforts. Where minimalist strings laid the foundation on past songs, they’re all but drowned out by guitars this time around, and while band leader Efrim Menuck was previously slow to integrate vocals, few seconds pass on the band’s latest that don’t contain his quivering wail. Silver Mt. Zion sound a lot like an honest-to-goodness rock band these days.

But don’t expect lots of hooks. For all practical purposes, 13 Blues is comprised of just four songs, discounting the 12 brief tracks of feedback and swells that serve as the album’s prologue. Each heaving composition hovers around the quarter-hour mark, none containing any sections bearing much semblance to a chorus. But the repeated bookends on opening track “1,000,000 Died to Make This Sound” establish a doomsday sing-along that counters the band’s more languid past forays into protest rock. The following title track exercises the dynamics that are expected from a Silver Mt. Zion release, but not in the same tried-and-true fashion to which we’re accustomed. Rather than rely on the minimalist repetition that fueled their past crescendos, SMZ keep the songs much looser on 13 Blues. Instead of slowly building into big climaxes, the band delves into extended freak-outs and quasi jam sessions. The result is one of the most engaging records the group has put to tape.

With newly emphasized lyrical content, Silver Mt. Zion have moved past implications of protest and are finally describing it. While the packaging of past SMZ and GYBE releases alluded toward some bitter anger, 13 Blues details that hostility explicitly. “Their way is debt and prisons / They’re burning half the world,” cries Menuck on “1,000,000 Died to Make This Sound.”

But as the group’s lyrical focus has grown, so too has the length of their songs. Long-winded passages once built the tension upon which the crescendos ascended, but the big pay-offs come earlier on 13 Blues. The songs don’t simply get louder with each passing second, and their length is largely the result of extended psychedelic sections that, instead of building to a conclusion, ultimately disintegrate and meander before finally fading. “Black Waters Blowed/Engine Broke Blues” suffers the most from the lack of concision by plodding along and placing the most emphasis on Menuck’s voice, which has never been the band’s strongest suit. Closer “BlindBlindBlind” sounds most like the Silver Mt. Zion of yore, and bridges the most glaring omissions from past records with the more rockin’ tendencies of their most recent work. The result is either an emphatic exclamation point or an ellipsis. Hopefully they stick with this stuff a little longer.