A Silver Mt Zion
This Is Our Punk Rock

A Norman Records recommendation (29th December 2006)

This record left our Phil feeling ecstatic.

A Silver Mount Zion release their brand new spanking elpee and ceedee on The Constellation Records of Canada. Godspeedy type folks making post rock for the minions. I heard this a few weeks ago and quite liked and then forget we had it so I haven't played it since. There's been a lot to do here! I have to say I think this is by far the best thing I've heard by 'em. Long drawn out experimental but quite coherent and catchy in places. This Is Our Punk Rock is superb.. Go on....

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What their label says...

This is the second full-length by the six-piece Tra-La-La-Band, along with guest drummers Eric Craven (Hangedup) and Howard Bilerman (who also recorded the album, at the Hotel2Tango). The band also brought in a couple dozen folks for mass choral duty on the opening and closing tracks (hence the "with choir" extension of the band name). While the group's previous album, Born Into Trouble As The Sparks Fly Upward (cst018), was a mostly instrumental work recorded in one weekend, the new record was sketched in rehearsals through the fall of 2002 and arranged in studio, resulting in four long pieces, all featuring group and/or lead vocals. Efrim's increased vocal presence is the most obvious evolution from past efforts, yielding the most direct articulation of themes and sentiments that have run throughout his work with Mt. Zion and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Long instrumental passages remain however, with dense layers of strings colliding against a backdrop of ragged repeating guitar figures and noise treatments.

The amateur choir assembled for the 'fasola' sing-along on the opening track sets the tone for an exuberant, community-rallying protest music that constitutes the spiritual foundation of the record. Destruction of communities (foreign and local) are lamented and eulogised in the songs that follow, culminating in the album closer: an ode to the empty railyard terrain adjacent to the neighbourhood where the band, along with many other Montreal musicians and artists, have lived for a decade or more. This land is now being swallowed up by big box and condo development. This is Our Punk-Rock... addresses the local/universal demise of uncontrolled and unregulated urban landscapes -- a demise that stretches from the docile walls of superstore complexes and protest 'pens' in the West to outright military surveillance, harassment and murderous 'surgical' strikes by Western-backed armies in South America and the Middle East. This unbroken curve is at the heart of Mt. Zion's poetics and politics -- this is their punk-rock.

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