Last September, at the Polaris Music Prize gala in Toronto, writer/Pitchfork contributor Jessica Hopper introduced shortlist nominees Godspeed You! Black Emperor by distilling their many achievements down to a single word: “no.” Which is to say, the Montreal ensemble’s success is a direct product of their refusal to engage in traditional music-industry practices or self-promotional glad-handing—an outlook that also extended to not showing up at the Polaris ceremony, nor gladly accepting the $30,000 purse they won later that night. (As per band tradition, they let their feelings be known via a collectively written communiqué.) However, offshoot band Thee Silver Mt. Zion—featuring Godspeed guitarist Efrim Menuck, violinist Sophie Trudeau, and bassist Thierry Amar, along with violinist Jessica Moss and drummer David Payant—has been more amenable to countering all that “no” with the odd “yes.” Though they share with Godspeed a deep suspicion of authority and institutions, and the faintest of hopes that sanity will prevail in a world gone mad, they’ve come to broadcast their ideas through more clearly communicated means: interviews, lengthy onstage addresses, lyrics we can all join in on, and songs that are both more outwardly anthemic and viscerally rocking than Godspeed’s slow-surging, side-long epics.
But while Menuck has become a more confident and charismatic vocalist over the years, his lyrics are often rendered in broad-strokes, addressing faceless bogeymen (a Dylanesque procession of bankers, hangmen, and the like) and macro societal maladies, while rooting their more sanguine songs in communal, universal affirmations. So the great strides made on the band’s seventh album, Fuck Off Get Free We Pour the Light on Everything, aren’t so much musical—it’s a logical extension of 2010’s Kollaps Tradixionales—but philosophical: This time, it’s personal. The album is less concerned with asserting a specific worldview than examining the difficulties of keeping one’s moral compass steady in a society that’s becoming ever-more indifferent to the things you value—and how one must remain all the more resolute once kids enter the picture.
Menuck and Moss became parents in recent years; that’s their boy Ezra we hear in the new album’s opening seconds, delivering the band’s simple mission statement: “We live on the island called Montreal, and we make a lot of noise… because we love each other!” The experience of new fatherhood factored into some of the songs on Menuck’s scaled-down 2011 solo release, Plays High Gospel, but that intimate perspective is retained here amid Thee Silver Mt. Zion’s orchestro-punk onslaught, with the band’s usual big-picture concerns intensified by the lingering question of what kind of world their children will inherit.
True to the band’s “Memorial Orchestra” and “Tra-La-La Band” suffixes, Thee Silver Mt. Zion albums have always contrasted eulogy with euphoria, but on Fuck Off Get Free the feelings of joy and terror are one and the same. Rather than use violins to embellish their guitar riffs, the album’s monstrous opening track (which, like Kollaps’ “I Built Myself a Metal Bird” is the rare TSMZ song to just charge out of the gates without an extended build-up) fuses the two into the same dissonant frequency. But amid this sound of confusion, Menuck leads the band in a group chant that’s almost nursery-rhyme-like in its simplicity; that album title may seem like a mouthful to read, but it’s surprisingly easy to sing. Fuck Off Get Free’s most exhilarating song is likewise a maelstrom of conflicted emotions: over the course of its 14 minutes, “Austerity Blues” channels screeching cacophony into rousing catharsis, however, Menuck’s triumphant refrain—“Lord, let my son/ Live long enough/ To see that mountain torn down”—is undercut by the implication that the singer won’t be around to see the better world he’s fighting for. And that latent anxiety comes boiling to surface on the raging “Take Away These Early Grave Blues”, which refines the heavy-metal klemzer heard on Godspeed’s 2012 colossus “Mladic” into a more concentrated burst; Menuck coyly acknowledges this otherwise despairing song’s shout-along accessibility when he fashions a hook—“let them sing our/ pretty songs”—that recalls the similarly sarcastic chorus of Nirvana’s “In Bloom”.
But even the album’s actual pretty songs are suffused with grave prophecies: The deceptively gentle “Little Ones Run”—a piano ballad sung by Trudeau and Moss—presents a bedside lullaby that parents can sing to calm down babies during the next extreme-weather eco-disaster (“Wake up darling the moon is gone/ The sky’s a mess and falling down”). Meanwhile, the album’s emotional centerpiece, “What We Loved Was Not Enough”, is a comment on modern-age ennui that could conceivably waltz its way onto the back half of Arcade Fire’s Reflektor (if that album was a little less disco and a little more Dischord), however, for Thee Silver Mt. Zion, the cost of apathy is more severe than just social disconnection: “There’ll be war in our cities/ and riots at the mall,” Menuck warns, before repeating his most chilling prognostication four times—“all our children gonna die.” All the while, the rest of the band sings, “and the day has come, when we no longer feel,” the sweetest of harmonies couching the bitterest of sentiments—i.e. that numbing oneself to atrocities is the only way to endure them.
And yet, amid this procession of devastation, Menuck sees a sliver of a silver lining, when he sings, “kiss it quick and it’ll rise again,” and the album’s closing track, “Rains Thru the Roof at the Grande Ballroom (For Capital Steez)”, channels that cautious optimism into a dreamlike haze that's equally haunting and comforting. Its title name-checks the Detroit theatre where The MC5 recorded their incendiary 1968 debut, Kick Out the Jams, and the song is introduced by an interview clip in which guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith issues a statement of purpose that Thee Silver Mt. Zion could easily claim as their own: “Music is a way of life, it’s more than just something you do on the weekend … it’s something you devote your life to.” But more than simply forge a spiritual connection between Thee Silver Mt. Zion and their proto-punk forefathers, the song’s central image—of a once-legendary venue reduced to ruins—serves as a symbol for the loss of radicalism in popular music.
And through that lens, the parenthetical shout-out to Pro Era rapper Capital Steez—who threw himself off a New York City building in late 2012—makes more sense, as a requiem for a kindred, politically outspoken voice silenced before his time. But for all the sorrow couched in Menuck’s trembling tenor, there is a sign of life amid the Grande Ballroom rubble: “The glass in its windows are still breathing,” he sings, suggesting the same anti-establishment ethos that fuelled a band of Motor City delinquents in the late-60s, and his own cabal of Montreal outsiders in the late-90s, and a teenaged Brooklyn MC in the early 2010s will persist long after he’s gone. Back in 2003, when this once-instrumental band was still literally finding its voice, Thee Silver Mt. Zion asserted their core ideology by naming their third album This Is Our Punk-Rock, and the increasingly aggressive albums released in the interim have made the members’ hardcore roots all the more apparent. But to ensure that the contrarian, questioning spirit of punk endures through future generations, Fuck Off Get Free reminds us of one of the key principles of hippiedom: teach your children well.
