The music of Efrim Manuel Menuck has rarely, if ever, evoked Bruce Springsteen. Over the last quarter-century, the cofounder of Montreal’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra has droned or groaned his way through barbed anarchist diatribes, feedback pitted, and screams pitched against the impending apocalypse he painted. There’s been little of the hope or warmth found in even Springsteen’s darkest moments. That’s why “A Lamb in the Land of Payday Loans”—the stunning pop song that starts the second half of Pissing Stars, Menuck’s second-ever solo album—is such a revelation: Despite the aggressive political face of Menuck’s work, he arrives here as a fellow romantic, looking for the complex redemption of love in the middle of a hellscape.
When “Lamb” begins, Menuck, who recorded all of Pissing Stars alone in several spells of self-imposed solitude during the last two years, stretches a scrim of noise against a simple rhythmic loop. Its major-key piano melody pounds through the din, a triumph beckoning from the distance. In first person, Menuck sings about being insignificant in a system of weaponized capitalism, of fighting “the hand of the man [who] holds stolen land.” He draws a slanting but savvy line between our culture of Wal-Marts and our militarized police, then asks for mercy at the hands of that machine. Speaking now for the layperson, he even borrows The Boss’ Nebraska yip.
At last, Menuck makes his getaway plea: “Put the kids in the car... O darlin’, let’s try to run,” he harmonizes with himself. It may be the most poignant moment of Menuck’s career, a line you want to shout back in concert alongside a crowd because you, too, know the feeling. It is his “State Trooper” or “Atlantic City,” his escape anthem for a world gone against him. If Springsteen had turned left at Tunnel of Love and followed through on his Suicide love with a drum machine and an army of effects (or, alternately, had he started the War on Drugs 20 years early), it might sound like this—sincere romanticism beset by the realities of existence, with the sound bent and blown out to match the mess around him.
Pissing Stars reveals Menuck trying to understand exactly what it is we get out of love and relationships, a bothered soul in search of any balm. Decades ago, Menuck read about a brief, unlikely romance between Mary Hart, the South Dakota beauty queen who worked for a quarter-century as the effervescent host of “Entertainment Tonight,” and Mohammed Khashoggi, a socialite best known as the son of the Saudi billionaire implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal. That is, the wholesome television host piped nightly into the homes of millions of Americans was in love with the scion of a notorious arms dealer—that moment’s domestic personification of overseas evil. The absurdity and beauty of it all stuck with Menuck for 30 years, providing a loose prompt for one of our collective questions: What is love trying to do for us, anyway?
The first half of Pissing Stars is bleak, even by Menuck’s standards. Its invocation, “Black Flags Ov Thee Holy Sonne,” scans as a nine-minute meditation on Donald J. Trump and global warming, spoken and chanted and shouted inside a mile-wide canyon of jagged noise and crumbling guitars. Then, over a foreboding industrial throb, Menuck delivers a fragile falsetto lament on the strong arm of the state. Against a luminous drone, he cuts clips from an infamous 1975 interview with Manson Family true believer Sandra Good, where she warned of impending assassinations for politicians who didn’t prioritize environmental protections. Here, it is the echo of an empty threat. This is a 23-minute suite of defeat, the music and mood as damaged as anything Menuck has ever made.
But “A Lamb in the Land of Payday Loans,” that shot of Springsteen, suddenly offers an escape route as everything else collapses. Indeed, Pissing Stars’ entire second half documents how, together, we cope with torment, or, as Menuck sings over a gorgeous hum, “how to breathe through pain.” During a mutated piano hymn, he serializes images of quiet despair—a county jail, an overflowing trash can, an ant drowning in a coffee mug—only to realize they are as temporary as his own feelings. “Soon we’ll all be empty,” he sings, his tired whimper lifting momentarily toward a smile. “Soon we’ll all be free.”
Pissing Stars ends with its title track, a corroded lullaby that directs the slow-motion stateliness of Low through a nightmarish gauntlet of noise. It’s an apt juxtaposition for any relationship that prompts, in Menuck’s words, both “misery” and “divinity.” These are lovely but wounded songs, as mixed up as the singer’s own ideas about life and love and how something that’s sometimes so ugly allows for something so good. Menuck pulls you into his abiding confusion, into the surreal place where the bubbly star and the son of an arms dealer help one another get through the night, if only for a little while.
In the seven years since his solo debut, 2011’s Plays “High Gospel,” Menuck has relaunched Godspeed You! Black Emperor for three records and for big tours that have sometimes taken them to arenas. Thee Silver Mt. Zion returned, too. But Pissing Stars feels purposefully small, a personal retreat from full-band compromise by someone who is trying to understand the world and his role in it. The result is indulgent, neurotic, and harrowing, a reminder of the complete mess we’ve made. But it’s oddly reassuring, too: a Springsteen-like reminder that the romantic has the heart that the system never will.
