Ten years ago, Thee Silver Mt. Zion appeared as one of many satellite projects orbiting around the Godspeed You! Black Emperor mothership, alongside fellow offshoot acts like Fly Pan Am and 1-Speed Bike. Today, it has supplanted the long-dormant godspeed as Constellation Records' flagship act-- not just in terms of popularity or acclaim, but as outspoken exemplars of the label's uncompromised business ethics. That outcome, however, seems less the product of a grand master plan-- as legend has it, the band was originally formed by Godspeed's Efrim Menuck, Sophie Trudeau, and Thierry Amar to pay musical tribute to Menuck's recently deceased dog-- than part of a dutiful obligation to fill an ideological void in underground rock culture. Over the course of a decade when Fugazi fell silent, Touch and Go Records shut down, and indie rock became a music-supervision goldmine, Thee Silver Mt. Zion have incrementally evolved from a meditative, mostly instrumental orchestro-folk ensemble into an imposingly heavy, politically enraged rock band, with Menuck emerging as the most seething, peculiar agit-punk mouthpiece since Guy Picciotto.
Naturally, not all of TSMZ's early adopters have been eager to follow the band's transformation into psych-metal curmudgeons-- 2008's mordantly hostile 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons was the band's most divisive release. Kollaps Tradixionales makes no apologies for this shift, but it does defuse 13 Blues' sometimes oppressive air by reconciling the band's current incarnation with its more graceful earlier output. Because, for all the change that TSMZ have undergone in the past 10 years, their music remains rooted in the ideology of perseverance in a cruel world. That quality is reflected in the band's collaborations with various veteran outsiders (Patti Smith, Grant Hart, the late Vic Chesnutt), and in Menuck's own torn and frayed voice.
On 2001's Born Into Trouble as the Sparks Fly Upward, a young girl is heard to say, "All we need is a little more light"; Kollaps Tradixionales revisits the sentiment on opener "There Is a Light". The song's theme of hard-won hope plays out in its structure-- a series of attempted ascensions and soft landings, each aiming higher than the one previous. With its church-organ hum, waltzing string, and brass arrangements-- and a final act where Menuck starts belting it out like David Bowie on "Five Years"-- this side-long suite is the most genial, comforting piece of music the band has produced in years.
But it's also a red herring, establishing a false sense of levity on an album that grows increasingly dark and despairing. "There Is a Light" is immediately answered by the two-part "I Built Myself a Metal Bird"/"I Fed My Metal Bird the Wings of Other Metal Birds", which redirects 13 Blues' bulldozing menace into more accelerated, exhilarating chamber-punk. The song's war-machine allusions climax with Menuck hysterically shouting, "dance, motherfuckers!"-- revealing not so much a desire to shake our hips as to point guns at our feet.
If "Metal Bird" captures TSMZ at their most incendiary, the trio of tracks that comprise the album's third side present the scorched-earth aftermath: "Kollapz Tradixional (Thee Olde Dirty Flag)" and "Collapse Traditional (For Darling)" are somber hymns that ruminate on faded glory, before the triptych's closing piece, "Kollaps Tradicional (Bury 3 Dynamos)", rides a psychedelicized Celtic reel skyward and explodes into a Zep-heavy grind. But TSMZ's perpetual process of channeling frailty into ferocity-- the recurring patterns of rising and falling, flaming out and reigniting-- has had a noticeably exhausting effect on the band by the time we reach album closer "'Piphany Rambler". Clocking it at 14 minutes, and staking claim to the album's entire fourth side, the song charts a pained, slow-crawling course similar to that of its nomadic, mountain-climbing narrator, the severity of his journey intensified by windswept string swells.
And in that, it's hard not to draw parallels with TSMZ's own course-- an autonomous rock band trying to assert its ethics, ideals, and political will in an indie rock culture that seems to value those principles less and less with each passing year. But when Menuck sings, "We crawled upside that mountain/ Down its ass and back again," his matter-of-fact delivery implies he's not expecting any great reward for his grunt-work. In fact, in the midst of the song's stormy finale, he pleads, "don't take these blues away"-- suggesting that Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra are well aware their own perseverance is emboldened by the very cultural forces that threaten it.
