I LOVE Post-Rock. I LOVE Godspeed You Black Emperor! I love Cellos, I love apocalyptic violins and drums and guitars which sound like they’re being recorded in a Cathedral. I love the noise, I love the slow build-up of tension in a fifteen-minute feedback epic, I love the absurd, over-the-top drama, passion and sheer excitement of this music.
bloody amateurs, that photo is CLEARLY upside down
Oh, but you’re wrong. I’m cold and objective. Like ice. I clinically examine all the music I listen to and dissect it with an objectivity which is both breathtaking and chilling in its coldness.
Oh, hang on, no, that’s a lie, isn’t it?
I had all kinds of excitable emotions when putting this album on. It was going to rock my world, it was going to transport me, I was going to hear the future of music, it was going to be brilliant.
And it was… ok.
It’s a Silver Mount Zion doing what they do- orchestral stuff, mournful dirges played out on the violin to a backdrop of distorted, angry guitar whilst drums clatter and rumble in the background. And it’s what they’ve done before.
There is a little progression- the songs are a little more riff-like than in the past at times. This is most notable on the second track, ‘I built myself a Metal Bird,’ which sounds a lot like Sonic Youth’s ‘Tunic’ would have if they’d had a string quartet in tow. That’s a pretty cool thing to sound like, by the way. I don’t want to sound like I don’t like this record, as I can already feel it growing on me on the third listen. There’s something refreshingly primal about their sound- the way it seems to have been conceived with no real thought about how things are supposed to work.
So what’s my problem?
There’s a lot of answers to that, but I suspect it boils down to two things. First, familiarity. Much like the aforementioned Sonic Youth, there’s a point at which a music which sounds unique and spectacular starts to get a bit, well, samey. We’ve heard this whole end-of-the-world-music-with-strings thing before, and it’s no longer a gimmick. Can its charm survive if it was simply the norm, as conservative and expected as guitar bass drums and vocals? After all, if Post-rock is to be what its title implies, that’s what’ll happen. Certainly, there’s a lot of bands out there happy to do this- to take the musical blueprint that Efrim Menuck and his various cohorts have laid down. Listen to Gifts from Enola, the Evtaporia report, Explosions in the Sky, Lipsync for a Lullaby and a thousand other bands and you’ll see what I mean. With those bands it feels ok- they’ve got their own take on things, and somehow for lesser lights your expectations aren’t as grand. They’re meant to look like reflections of the originators, as that’s what they are.
For these lot, though, the bar’s a little higher. They came up with this shit. They began it. They epitomize it. You don’t listen to them to be reminded of a band who blew your mind, you want it blown in other ways.
Another minor gripe is Ephraim’s voice, too- it’s kind of a three-way cross between Húsker Du’s Grant Hart, Win Butler from Arcade Fire, and that shouty guy out of Modest Mouse. Not exactly melodic. It’s over this record more than the others, and for me it actually kind of spoils the opening 15-minute epic, ‘There is a Light.’ It’s a shame, because I find myself wondering about the possibilities of this music. I imagine how this band would sound with a vocalist like Thom Yorke, Wayne Coyne, or even a darker, deeper voice like Nick Cave. Actually, if he teamed up with Warren Ellis’ Dirty Three, that’d be amazing, but I digress.
The point is that on this record, they seem to have fallen into that all-too-familiar trap which means that independent and ‘alternative’ (whatever the hell that debased term means any more) means singing out of tune, being deliberately abrasive. It’s a shame, because to my mind that one musical decision takes the gloss off something which could otherwise have been absolutely transcendent.
So, a good album, but not a great one. And perhaps one whose flaws signpost the way forward.
