It's hard to know exactly what to call this thread. The band keep shifting their identity, from A Silver Mt Zion to The Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band, and now Thee Silver Mountain Reveries.
It's a real shame to simply list them as a Godspeed side project, as they've almost equalled that band on the number of releases (the difference being that one of Godspeed's wasa double). There are many similarities: an obsession with urban space, railroads, hands, Judeo-Christian references, judgement from on high, delivered in a confusion of anger, pain, loss, hope and defiance.
However, A Silver Mt Zion cover a far wider remit: they go from the apocalyptic punk and desperate rage of Godspeed to more contemplative passages. They're more personal, more wounded, more hopeful, more compassionate. Efrim's voice creaks and breaks between terrifying and desolate, heartbroken and impassioned, lyrically cursing himself and and the world, never letting himself off the hook.
But then there's that little extra that they bring, a theme they've visited before but characerised best on the last track of their new EP (Pretty Little Lightning Paw). The song is There's a River in the Valley Made from Melting Snow, in which the tired and beaten give up making their plans and retire to the valley in order to heal and learn to laugh and love again, rebuilding their strength and knowing that they will return to the battle one day. It's this understanding of the need to fight on mixed with the recognition of a potentially lost cause, the defiant last stand, breaking yourself and mending yourself in a perpetual cycle that makes their music so deeply stirring.
A Silver Mt Zion step out from behind the curtain, identify themselves as normal people who laugh and love like the rest of us. At their gig last month they sang the repeated refrain, "Take care of each other" to close the set. From the lips of this band that's punk rage, not hippy sentiment: it's one of the few violent slogans that I can fully make my own.
A call to arms. |
