efrim menuck – guitar, piano, vocals, organ, toybox
thierry amar – violin, bass, vocals
sophie trudeau – bass, vocals
jessica moss - violin, vocals
ian ilavsky - drums
1) more action! less tears!
2) microphones in the trees
3) pretty little lightning paw
4) there's a river in the valley made of melting snow
Collector's Item
in hindsight, this ep comes off as a sort of an experiment. the mt zions have repeatedly indicated a sort of boredom with post-rock and have been trying to get out of it for quite a while. in the end, they seem to always go back to it. on a level, they're sort of stuck. i can plead guilty to keeping them stuck there, but it's not out of an aversion to them trying something different so much as the directions they keep going in. like, start a punk band. i'd dig that. they seem to like punk. there are a lot of reasons to think they'd be very interesting if they went in a sort of hafler trio direction, or even flat-out industrial noise. but, the delves into generic folk and corporate rock have left me unsatisfied, even as i rant about how boring and generic that post-rock has become.
obviously, i'm suggesting less commercial turns of direction than they've actually taken and that contrast sort of colours my reaction. the experiments here are sort of floundering; a few of them come off fairly well, but even the more interesting sections are marred by a sort of contrivedness. see, it's sort of obvious that they're trying to piggyback on what radiohead was doing at the time. well, the shift is too dramatically obvious to suggest anything else. they were generating a lot of interest in the radiohead community. this is a deduction, but it's obvious. that's not to say that the ep sounds like radiohead so much as it is to suggest that it seems like it was constructed to appeal to radiohead fans - a subtle, but very significant distinction. or simply influenced by? no, not this band.
so, here is the reality, bluntly, after many years of contemplation: when a collective that built itself up on it's ability to channel raw emotion all of a sudden moves to something that is cerebrally calculated, the contrast is so clear that it cannot be missed. it denies the act of the precise, exact quality that generated interest amongst fans, rendering them almost obsolete.
what happens with the next few mt zion discs, though, is a sort of a struggle between the real and emotional and the calculated and dour that swings back and forth rather wildly, creating highly erratic results. for this disc?
the first track is some kind of homage to do make say think, or broken social scene, or something like that. on some level it seems tongue in cheek, but the sad thing is that it seems to miss it's own irony. it comes off more as a parody than anything else, but due to the way it's presented in it's introduction it seems more like a parody of themselves. the second track moves into the aforementioned post kid a territory, rooting itself in an awkwardly dour and heavily reverberated loop that seems to go on forever before it breaks up into a wash of noise - a neat track in theory, but the emotion is missing. something similar could be said of the third track. lyrically, the explorations are of paranoia and freedom, themes that are actually shared between radiohead and the gybe/zion collective. however, they have a distinctly mundane quality that could be arguably labeled as "annoying".
the last track is a real treat, though. some kind of johnny cash type thing; the band may have been thinking of freak folk as a way to break the monotony of being a post-rock band, and while they would explore folk further they never produced anything remotely approaching this. there's a continuity in the heavy reverb from the previous two tracks, but what separates it from the rest of the disc is that it feels real in it's resignation and passive hope.
as this is a collection of mostly failed experiments, i'm labeling it a collector's item and sticking to it. however, it's probably the band's most accessible work. the caveat is that it isn't at all similar to any of their other records.