SMZ triumphantly return four years after Kollaps Tradixionales. It’s getting even clearer now why for all those years, the group’s members seemed a bit skeptical and avoided to use the terms post rock to describe what they do with their music. Their immediate connection to Godspeed You! Black Emperor will always be there for reference, and to maybe unfairly place them in that bottomless pit of countless post rock bands of which most have come out from every possible direction since the nineties. Not many of those bands though could relate in any way to that idealistic mighty punk rock ethos and aesthetics. SMZ definitely can, and for this one they did as they promised: a new record of heavier and more direct sound.
There’s a deep sorrowful feeling all over the album’s fifty minutes. Whether the structures are simple or complex, acoustic or electric that feeling is always present, constant and really intense. Not a hint of pretentiousness in those fifty minutes. It’s all honest. The aftertaste is not bitter though.
Melancholy goes side to side with hope throughout the album's entirety, and its evident while experiencing its contents. Hope, as there’s hope in the post Apocalypse, at the moment one copes with his own mortality, as he wakes up covered in debris; as a single beam of light comes out through the dark grey skies. Hope as in the phrase Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down, sung in every imaginable way.
Out on January 21st from Constellation
Pre-order from Constellation
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