Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra to debut new album

If you’ve ever heard of the mostly instrumental post-punk Canadian act Godspeed You Black Emperor!, chances are you learned of them through the excellent 2002 flick “28 Days Later.” The band’s haunting post-apocalyptic piece "East Hastings" can be heard as Serena tears through the zombie-filled mansion in a vibrant red dress.

What you may not know, is that the group has subtle Jewish themes present in its artwork and audio samples — and singer-guitarist Efrim Menuck has another current band that delves even deeper into these themes.

The group, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, performs lengthy and complicated compositions full of percussion and violin, overlaid with achingly beautiful vocals by Menuck.

In a Tablet article last year, writer Jonathan Dixon wrote: “If Godspeed flirted with Jewish material, [Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra] addresses it head-on, in both tone and subject. Fronted by Menuck, who is Jewish, the band draws themes and lyrics from Genesis and the Psalms, employs Hebrew, and frequently references angels and Babylon.”

Menuck formed Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra (also known as simply Silver Mt. Zion, Thee Silver Mt. Zion and inexplicably, Tra-La-La Band) in Montreal, Quebec in 1999 along with fellow members of Godspeed. It was announced this week that the band’s new album Kollaps Tradixionales (Constellation) will debut Feb. 16, 2010.

In an interview with Jewcy’s Matthue Roth last year, Menuck explained some of his reasoning for including religious references in his music:

“...faith is a lovely thing, even if you don't believe in God. It's partly why the band is named after Mt. Zion—it's the holy mountain in the awful desert that illuminates the choruses of Baptist hymns, dusty klezmer tunes, and 6-minute dubplates. Also, I spent grades one through nine at Hebrew day school, and came home every night to my atheist father, who would try to undo any little thing I’d happened to learn that day.

This means that, somewhere in my little pea-brain, there's a knotted scar where the secular and the godly have fused; means that I tend to see things in terms of good and evil, write large, and means that I believe in congregations, hymns and prayers but not in God, so when I try to put words together to sing on top of this music that we all write together, that jumble just pours out of me, worried and conflicted and messy as hell.”

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