SOUNDTRACK: THEE SILVER MT. ZION MEMORIAL ORCHESTRA & TRA-LA-LA BAND-Horses in the Sky [CST033] (2005).
This album is described as 
“6 busted ‘waltzes’ for world wars 4 thru 6” … the “first song’s about war and drug addiction, fourth song’s about kanada, and the rest of it is all love songs.”
This album proves to be their folkiest and most organic sounding album. The songs are mostly pretty mellow, including one that was recorded at a campfire.
“God Bless Our Dead Marines” opens the disc. It’s 12 minutes long and begins “They put angels in the electric chair, the electric chair.” The melody is pretty catchy and the accompanying minimal strings accentuate the song nicely. About 90 seconds into the song, the drums come in and the song takes on a rumbling field. The vocals are repeated a lot, and Efrim’s voice is placed nicely in the mix. The middle of song takes on a kind of shanty quality with lots of clapping and a loud electric guitar. Around 3:30 the song stops and a new melody comes in, primarily on bowed bass. The sound of this section is spare but very cool. The piano returns (this is one of the first songs in a while to rely so heavily on piano) and a new melody (including the title of the song) is sung (again, a very catchy folk-song kind of melody) with occasional guitar chords. The lyrics are also pretty straightforward and poetic. While in no way suggesting this song could have been popular, it is certainly approachable and fairly conventional (even at 11 minutes). At 9 minutes the song is stripped of all music except piano. And several rounds of voices begin singing “when the world is sick, can no one be well, but I dreamt we were all beautiful and strong.” When the third set of voices (these are bass) come in, it really sounds great.
“Mountains Made of Steam” opens with guitar harmonics and a contrasting simple guitar melody. The vocals come in about 90 seconds in. The song is also surprisingly stripped down. The voices and bass grow a little louder at around 3 minutes, but not in a building and building kind of way. After a few rounds of “Ya di da di di’s,” the instrumental section swells. It is loud and soaring but not big the way GYBE is. The low resounding bowed bass in this song is really fantastic–it’s very big and round and really satisfying
“Horses in the Sky” opens with acoustic guitars and Efrim singing quietly. It sounds like a very traditional folk song. There’s a second voice singing harmony (just about everyone is listed as doing vocals). The lyrics sum up the tone of the song, “Schools look like prisons and our prisons look like malls / Downtown just a sick parade where no one cares at all.” This is one of the few songs from the band that doesn’t really change over the course of the whole song (some keyboards are added, but it is otherwise pretty much just guitar and voice).
“Teddy Roosevelt’s Guns” starts with echoed guitars and strings and the vocals: “Kanada oh Kanada I ain’t never been your son.” Strings slowly fill out the melody as more voices start singing that above refrain and Efrim’s indictments mount. This continues with some swirling strings until about 7 minutes when the drums start pounding out three note blast. When the vocals come back in, they are the harshest on the album, both from the lead and backing vocals.
“Hang on to Each Other” was recorded “next to a campfire by the river” … “at Garfield’s fire pit.” You can hear the fire crackling as the song begins. There’s some simple “ba dum da da dum” vocals before a harmonium grows louder. Aside from that instrument, it’s otherwise almost entirely a capella with various voices singing different parts, primarily “hang on to each other,” “any fucking thing you love” and “birds toss precious flowers from the murky skies above” in various rounds and harmonies. It’s really quite a moving song.
“Ring Them Bells (Freedom Has Come and Gone)” is 13 minutes long. The song opens with slow strings. A voice, which follows a piano melody, sings the “freedom has come and gone” part. The song feels fuller than the rest of the album with strings and bass filing the background. The instrumental part is the biggest and most dramatic on the record with swelling strings and occasional guitars ringing out until 4 minutes in when everything drops out except for one violin and a bass and a new vocal melody. But soon enough a buzzy electric guitar comes in to add more drama to this song. And then it quiets down again, with staccato guitar and strings getting softer and softer until it fades out entirely for a few seconds. And then a new guitar line begins. It is replaced by single piano notes and wild (but quiet) feedback. Efrim sings over as the feedback builds louder and louder until the screeching end.
This is definitely one of my favorite overall SMtZ albums. Even if it is quieter and less diverse than other ones, the melodies and song structures are really solid.
The band is back up to seven people for this recording with all of the former players playing but with Scott Levine Gilmore on drums.
- Thierry Amar – contrabass, glasses, harmonica, voice
- Becky Foon – cello, voice
- Ian Ilavsky – guitar, harmonium, voice
- Scott Levine Gilmore – drums, percussion, guitar, mandolin, voice
- Efrim Menuck – guitar, piano, voice
- Jessica Moss – violin, piano, glasses, voice
- Sophie Trudeau – violin, trumpet, glasses, voice
[READ: May 3, 2016] The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard
Eddie Campbell wrote The Black Diamond Detective Agency which I enjoyed, and The Fate of The Artist, which I enjoyed even more. Both were pretty unusual–lots of different things going on. Well, this book has even more stuff going on in it.
I genuinely didn’t know what to expect from this. I assumed it would be a biography of Jules Léotard, the daredevil acrobat who developed the art of trapeze, popularized the one-piece item that bears his name and was the inspiration for the song “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.”
But in this book that Jules Léotard dies on page 12. Upon his deathbed, with no will written, his worldly possession (a fake mustache) is bequeathed to his nephew, Etienne. So Etienne puts on the mustache and flies to Paris (in a hot air balloon, of course) to join Leotard’s troupe of circus performers. When he finds out that they have eaten most of the animals because they were starving, his plans change somewhat.
And so this book is all about Etienne pretending to be the (possibly reincarnated) amazing Léotard and the fascinating adventures he gets up to. (more…)
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SOUNDTRACK: PAT BENATAR & NEIL GIRALDO-Tiny Desk Concert #407 (November 24, 2014).
I never liked Pat Benatar. Back in the day she was all over MTV (and even in Fast Time at Ridgemont High) and I just didn’t like her. I’m not sure why, although I was particularly bitter about “Hell is for Children” (being a child myself). Of course, I still know all of her singles really well.
I Just Read About That... 