13 Blues For Thirteen Moons [Import]

I am new to these guys, having only listened to Godspeed You Black Emperor for the first time last week, and having bought this album on the strength of that one. I'm glad I did. This is great music, more immediately accessible to me than the instrumental music but still very distinctive, original and above all effective. It rocks and is sad at the same time, a tricky thing to pull off. Wonderful stuff, intelligent, powerful and moving.

There remains a strong contingent of people who still want their post-rock subtle, elegant and adorned in ribbons. They still want it to be accessible and gentle - to be inoffensive so they can let it hopelessly loop in the background to their daily activities. The result is an immense over-saturation of mediocre, atmospheric noodling that accounts for the majority of post-rock today. The one-time powerful and grandiose sound has became reduced to formulaic cliches. It has been drained of its original vitality.

I can remember years back hearing the likes of Slint, Godspeed You! Black Emporer and Mogwai and being immediately taken. The atmosphere, the textures, the guitar sounds...it was unlike anything I had ever heard, and still haven't to this day. It was cutting edge, it was experimental, it was utterly powerful. It was POST-rock. It was most importantly foreward-thinking. Sadly, it has lost its way, and I can't help but question what happened to all the potential? What happened to music without barriers, without constraints? How did it all become middle-ground, ambient instrumental `rock'? What happened to the punch in it all?

Thankfully other people have been thinking likewise, including Efrim Menuck himself. To be blunt, "13 Moons" is the first post-rock album that hasn't bored me in a long time. Maybe even years. It's a hefty kick in the balls to the congealed bile that has been clogging this once superb genre.

This should be evident with one listen to the immense "1,000,000 Died To Make This Sound". Gentle plucking and a haunting vocal harmony repeating the title set the scene. Around the refreshingly early 4 minute mark instruments are added - the guitars ring with a real gritty tone, there's even a hint of a guitar RIFF! Steady of there Efrim, you might give yourself a cardiac arrest! Anyway, the drums crash, the strings pierce and detract, and Efrim unleashes his angsty vocals. Things build and build, twisting and turning, until the main melody is unleashed in unison with every instrument. It's a beautiful moment and it takes me right back to the glory days of GY!BE. Satisfyingly, so satisfyingly, the crescendo is stripped down, taken to its minimal extreme and washed over with Efrim's idiosyncratic delay chords. The song is a sheer triumph. It had me smiling, fist pumping the air and shouting YES! YES! THIS IS MOST DEFINATELY NOT BACKGROUND MUSIC, HUZZAH!

I won't go into details with all the songs here, that would be like...listening to other recent post-rock albums! All you need to know is that excellence is continued. The final crescendo to the title track is immense, and the melodies throughout "Black Waters Bowed" are as touching as anything in the band's back catalogue.

I also want to address the vocals and lyrics. I've read a bunch of reviews claiming Menuck has ruined A Silver Mt.ZIon's sound with his newfound emphasis on vocals. A barrage of abuse has been slung at them - tone deaf, grating, unlistenable etc. His lyrics have also been attacked as being perverse and naively obvious. I really couldn't care less. Yes, his vocals are often whacked out of key, but they are full of energy and emotion. It's refreshing to hear someone just occasionally unleash his voice, not giving a rat's anus what comes out. When the music gets big, his vocals penetrate over the top so wonderfully. At times it acts more like another instrument than a voice.

And then the lyrics...sure, a line like "the hangman has a hard-on" is deliberately obtuse and maybe a little pretentious, but hey, since when was this band not? I find it ridiculous that people can attack the lyrics as pretentious cliches and disregard all the other jargon surrounding these guys. For example, their incessant desire to slam as many words in a song title as possible, or their odd seemingly pointless tinkering with their name. Also, have all you critics always understood what this music is saying. I mean, exactly? Can you all say you really got exactly what GY!BE's message was about? All those clippings and texts in liner notes, do you get all that? Sure, you know both bands have an anti-establishment, political thing going on, but is it crystal clear to you? Surely by now people can be ready for the odd deliberately obtuse, over-your-head `message'. To bring up ASMZ on this is like being surprised the latest Metallica album is rubbish.

Overall I can say that this is a post-rock album that really kicks you in the teeth. For a while now the genre has been a slacking mess, full to the brim of mediocre ambient rock bile. I've been bored so much that I had become disillusioned. Certainly "13 Moons" is rough around the edges, but it's simply the most monumental ride this genre has seen since GY!BE.

Silver Mt Zion are the most prominent (and succesful) of all of the various splinter groups that emerged from Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who have now been on 'hiatus' for 5 years. The vocals mark their records immediately as different from the Godspeed output, although they share some of the sense of the apocalyptic in the drama and pacing of their songs; sadly it's the vocals on 13 Moons which ruin the whole experience for me.

In a recent interview Efrim spoke about how Godspeed had difficulties finding a way to communicate to their audience - the implication being that through the vocal content of Silver Mt Zion songs allowed for a very concentrated political message to be passed on. However, whereas Godspeed for me managed to convey the political ideas of the band without stating them in an eloquent and powerful manner, the Mt Zion songs tend to sledgehammer these ideas home in a way that leaves me cold. The lyrics are truly dreadful, in the realm of bad sixth-former poetry - "the hangman's got a hard-on/the pretty minstrels sway/the pundit reeks of coffin/the banker rapes some maids" - and after 5 albums his vocal style grates rather than adding anything to the songs. As always, there are some truly sublime moments where the music simply soars, but this album relies heavily on guitars and on occasion the cello and violin end up lost inside the mix.

In past offerings the songs have shone through even when the recorded versions haven't lived up to their live counterparts - "There's A River In A Valley Made of Melting Snow" on the 'Reveries' EP never quite matched the fragile beauty of the live version for example - but on this record the songs are overblown, overlong and simply not interesting enough.

Constellation has always been a label that runs the risk of falling into self-indulgence with its releases and roster, but this is the first time I've been left bored and cold by a Mt Zion record. A big disappointment.