Thee Silver Mt. Zion sings songs of protest and scorn

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      The blues is a famously malleable form, yet it’s rarely been stretched, bent, and pummelled to such extreme ends as it is on Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything, the new album from Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra.

      Granted, Muddy Waters or Skip James would probably have a hard time figuring out the relationship: the Silver Mt. Zion sound is built on overamped electric violins, fuzzed-up guitar, cavern-deep bass lines, and reverb-splashed drumming, topped by Efrim Menuck’s postpunk yowling. Read Fuck Off Get Free’s lyric sheet, though, and the lineage becomes clear: these are modern songs of protest and scorn. “Thieves and liars rule everything we know/Thieves and liars rule everything that grows,” goes “Austerity Blues”, suggesting that wage slavery in the data mines is not all that far removed from picking cotton under the Delta sun.

      “For us, it’s about the idea that if you’re writing a song of complaint or a mourning of something, that’s a blues,” says singer-guitarist Menuck, minutes after the Memorial Orchestra has rolled into San Francisco. “And then you explain what the blues is in the title. I dunno… It’s just such a lovely form!”

      It’s not that the singer-guitarist and his comrades are trotting out the shuffles on the new disc; its six songs, running up to 14 minutes in length, follow a more oceanic pattern, surging forward in swells of angsty blasting broken by brief moments of aching beauty. But the band has evidently found a more straightforward connection to the folk roots that have always underpinned its noise, thanks in part to the two brilliant albums, North Star Deserter and At the Cut, that it made with the Georgia-born songwriter Vic Chesnutt prior to his suicide in 2009.

      “All of us, most of what we listen to is old music, but we felt sort of removed from that in terms of the music that we actually play,” Menuck explains. “And somehow working with Vic, because he was so clearly working within a tradition, helped ground us within the fact that we’re also working in a tradition. That’s the biggest influence it had: making us feel like we’re working within a tradition, as opposed to just sort of being orphans.”

      A few other factors contribute to Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything’s emotionally charged sound and content, one being ambition. “We’re always trying to play things that are a little bit out of our grasp,” says Menuck. “A lot of that has to do with playing in voicings that are a little difficult for us, or else singing in keys that are a little difficult for us to sing in, or playing songs that keep a relentless tempo, where it can be hard sometimes to keep your breath.”

      And then there’s the city where the band and its music were born: Mon­treal, alternately celebrated and castigated in songs like the new record’s title track. “We’re sort of hated by the province of Quebec because we’re a multicultural city: there’s many languages spoken there, and so we’re a pain in the ass to the province,” Menuck says. “And then of course the province has a contentious relationship to the rest of Canada, so it can feel often that, as Montrealers, we’re sort of shat on by two different levels of government—or three, actually, ’cause our municipal government is incredibly corrupt.

      “Yet there’s also something about public expression in Montreal,” he adds, “especially in the last couple of years, that’s pridefully stubborn and loudmouthed.”

      That bolshie spirit found expression in last month’s electoral rejection of pure laine demagoguery, but it’s rarely sounded fiercer than it does in Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s new music.

      Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra plays the Rio Theatre on Friday (May 2).

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