When Efrim Menuck's harpoon-like guitar ruptures
the belly of space-time about four minutes into "1,000,000 Died To Make This
Sound"—the first track of Silver Mt. Zion's 13 Blues For Thirteen
Moons—it
pretty much renders hair-splitting, critical analysis, and even rational
thought irrelevant. Simply put, the song is like an enema for the
universe—an angry enema. Fueled by Menuck and company's snowballing choral power
and compositional fire, 13 Blues is a parsec-spanning extension of the band's 2005
stunner Horses In The Sky. From the screeching, gouging distortion of the
new disc's opener to the pizzicato violin of its coda, "BlindBlindBlind,"
Menuck—once the stereotypically reticent singer, back when he and his
group first diverged from the instrumental Godspeed You! Black Emperor—has
wedded raw, symphonic swells to his palpably gripping, folk-fathered yowl. It's
a voice as bleak and fervent as John Lydon's circa The Flowers Of Romance. It's also pissed as all
hell, dripping with a vinegar that turns to syrup as if via alchemy. Today's
politically charged songwriters can drop coy manifestos and clever metaphors
all they want—Silver Mt Zion's 13 Blues actually flushes out the
psychic, karmic residue of a suicidal civilization just to stomp around in all
that apocalyptic plasma.