A SILVER MOUNT ZION - This is our Punk Rock

Format: CD

Label & Cat.Number: Constellation Records CST027

Release Year: 2003

Note: oversized gatefold-cardboard cover

Price (incl. 19% VAT): €16.00

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Ja, das ist wirklich ne andere Art von PUNK ROCK! Auf ihrem dritten Album bedient sich das Montrealer Ensemble eines Chors, und überhaupt spielen Lyrics eine viel größere Rolle als vorher. Enstanden sind vier lange eindringlich-melancholische Songs, etwas weniger episch und monumental als gewohnt, mit einem stärkeren 70er Jahre Psychedelik - Flair..
Kommt wieder im handgeschnitzten Siebdruck-Cover mit dicken Booklet und dem typischen Constellation-Artwork.

“This third full-length recording by Mt. Zion finds the band continuing to work as a six-piece, with various guests on drums & a couple dozen folks on choral duty. The core personnel remains Efrim (guitar, piano, tapes, effects, vocals), Thierry (bass), Sophie (violin), Beckie (cello), Ian (guitar) & Jessica (violin).
While the band's previous album, Born Into Trouble As The Sparks Fly Upward (cst018), was recorded immediately after a European tour and went to tape largely unadorned, the new record was sketched in rehearsals through the fall of 2002 & then extensively arranged in studio at the hotel2tango. The result is four long pieces, each in two or more sections, all featuring group &/or lead vocals. Efrim's increased vocal presence is the most obvious evolution from past efforts, yielding the most direct articulation of themes & emotions that have run throughout his work with Mt. Zion & godspeed you! black emperor. Long instrumental passages remain however, marked by the most compositionally deliberate, complex & precise writing the band has set to tape thus far. Dense layers of strings collide, blend & differentiate against a backdrop of ragged repeating guitar figures & noise treatments.
The amateur choir assembled for the 'fasola' sing-along on the opening track sets the tone for an exuberant community-rallying protest music that constitutes the spiritual foundation of the record. Destruction of communities (foreign & local) are lamented & eulogised in the following tracks, culminating in the album closer: an ode to the unzoned terrain surrounding the railyards adjacent to the neighbourhood where the band, along with many other Montreal musicians & artists, have lived since the early 1990s. This land is now being swallowed up by big box & condo development.
"This is Our Punk-Rock,”... addresses head-on the local/universal demise of uncontrolled and unregulated urban landscapes - a demise that stretches from the docile walls of superstore complexes & protest 'pens' in the West to outright military surveillance, harassment & murderous 'surgical' strikes by Western-backed armies in South America & the Middle East. This unbroken curve is at the heart of Mt. Zion's poetics & politics - this is their punk rock.” [press release]