HORSES IN THE SKY

The ever shape shifting stylistic approach with a chameleoneque name to match, the fourth album under Godspeed You! Emperor's side project SILVER MOUNTAIN PROJECT returns only this time as THEE SILVER MT ZION MEMORIAL ORCHESTRA & TRA-LA-LA BAND (note the dropping of the "With Choir") from 2003's ""This Is Our Punk-Rock," Thee Rusted Satellites Gather + Sing,). HORSES IN THE SKY emerged two years later with the EP "Pretty Little Lightning Paw" slipped in between. Also noticed the unusually short album title!

Once again Menuck is joined by an army of musicians and vocalists who play everything from the standard rock guitar, bass, piano and drums to the more chamber rock appropriate cello, violin, trumpet, harmonica, mandolin and contrabass topped off by a veritable choir of backing vocals whose precision singing skills offsets Menuck's quivering vocal instability. In fact Robert Kennedy Jr? Is that you? LOL. While still considered a post-rock and musically speaking clearly follows in its own footsteps, this time around all those vocal tracks scattered around on the band's first releases suddenly because the dominant force.

In fact every track is song oriented and every song features an overdose of Menuck's hard-to-swallow vocal shortcoming, the boon to many (including myself) and the welcome accoutrement for others who can't get enough of that indie rock off-kilter singing bravado. In fact Modest Mouse comes to mind throughout HORSES IN THE SKY had that Washington based band delved into the world of sing-along post-rock campfire songs that is. In a way this album reminds me of all those gleeful songs we sang as kids in grade school with the music teacher playing her heart out on the piano while our underdeveloped innocent lyrical content came spewing from our less than professional musical mouths like an off-key choir struggling in its infancy.

Despite the innocence and childlike qualities of the sing-along sessions, the music is nothing but a serious matter with concert hall quality performances stealing the show whenever Menuck chooses to close his yap and let it all rise to the forefront. It's a welcome event indeed for those of us who find Efrim's best efforts to become a bit overwhelming throughout an album's worth of convulsing solfeggios punctuating the rich tapestry of sound like nails on the chalkboard. There's a bit of country hoedown feel to the whole thing as well as it evokes some sort of traditional bumpkin music in the USA Appalachians of the the early years of the nation's existence especially when the banjo comes out to play.

More chamber folk than post-rock this time around, this one will certainly test the patience of those who merely tolerated Menuck's vocal contributions on previous efforts and the worst nightmare of those who cringed every time he opened his big fat piehole. Musically the album is sweet and tender which contrasts greatly with the outrage expressed lyrical content which laments everything from war, prison life and myriad social injustices worldwide. In fact if you actually listen to the lyrics they are quite bleak and depressing, a stark contrast to the otherwise more uplifting musical score which belies the Godspeed and Silver Mt Zion trend of dark melancholic musical deliveries which occasional do overpower everything else.

The album is well regarded so apparently not everyone is as repulsed by Menuck's seismically unretrofitted vocal charm as i am and to be fair when his singing is subdued it's tolerable however most of the album finds him bellowing a pseudo-falsetto which makes me wonder if the whole thing is a parody of some sort or just a stylistic approach that offers a degree of separation from the competition and SILVER MT. ZION releases in general. Whatever the case this will be a hard pill for many to swallow but if vocal shakiness is not a problem then you will most certainly like this more than i do.