Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra - Kollaps Tradixionales
SKU
05--CONSTELLATION063
"Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra (SMZ) returns with its sixth full-length recording and first since the band's line-up change of summer 2008. As Kollaps Tradixionales ably demonstrates, the band has lost none of its raw and frazzled anthemic power and continues to forge bold new ground in its search for a unique hybrid of punk, blues, psych, folk and modern orchestral idioms. Anchored by the fried electric guitar and plangent voice of band leader Efrim Menuck (who previously co-founded Godspeed You! Black Emperor) SMZ continues to slide comfortably and unforcedly towards an expansive, loose and blues-inflected balladry -- not so much the inexorably riffing blues shuffle of the title track from its previous effort, 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons, but a more languid waltz-time marking an almost smoldering dynamic arc. Needless to say, the slow burn with SMZ, whatever the blues influence these days, bears little reference to typical notions of musical seduction, relaxation, or hip-swinging satisfaction. What smolders here is much more precarious and anxious, driven by some of this decade's more devastating lyrical conjurings -- of the universal outsider and the thematics of 21st century western psychic oppression. The sonic references are abundant, ranging from afrobeat to bouzouki music to hard bop to punk rock -- culminating in the memorable refrain 'dance you motherfuckers.' The three phases of the album's 'title track' on Side Three (with their variant spellings and parenthetical modifiers) are indeed 'traditionals' of a sort, playing on tropes of American and Anglo-Saxon folk, marching song, sea shanty and hymnal."