HE HAS LEFT US ALONE BUT SHAFTS OF LIGHT SOMETIMES GRACE THE CORNER OF OUR ROOMS

In 2000 starts, solidly, the A Silver Mt. Zion experience, an ensemble that varies as musicians and even as name, still insists of a lonely great, deep, penetrating and sometimes over the top style of music. This project definitely roasted a few years before, since it's the msot visible and most underline side-project born from the series of post-rock, dark rock and art rock from the inspiration wave that is Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The fact the Godspeeds themselves create their most amazing and powerful album in 2000, after which they create few more long experiments then fall in silence, tells a lot about the relation with Silver Mt. Zion, which is justifiably a band continuing the great style; sometimes, it is even blacker at spirit, more darker and pessimistic or more tumultuous and (theatrically) nerving.

Their first album, He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Sometimes Grace The Corner Of Our Rooms (there couldn't be a more proper, hard-experimental and far from simple title; from here on to the musical material there's only a small step...), is not a "debut", it is a full and saturated album - and it among the shining ones, even if it's interesting how the band evolves later on. The shine of this album regards, beyond everything else, the toughness, exhibitionism-touched excitement of art music, covering you, overwhelming you (in smaller ways that imagined, true), itching you or making you flake out. He Has Left Us Alone... is maybe an album that doesn't deserve its entire flame of four stars, yet it has a beauty of grunting force, it is of a heavy and successful art, it oscillates between the perturbing and the passive, between the shouting and the sensible, it impresses long enough, not being at all typical, nor too mellow in its abstract dooming.

He Has Left Us Alone... gathers all of Silver Mt. Zion's main elements - some of them being very good, very touching. Such elements are the core of the music, realizing full contrasts of temperament or drama, dark poetry or heavy operatic language, rock dynamic or sound lusciousness. Music itself is between theatrical, emotional and cynical. Silver Mt. Zion is genuinely the smaller ensemble of Godspeed You Black Emperor!, using the same kind of post-rock build exhausting gauge, dark/raw imagination and protesting/apostrophizing outbreak - the style is close pigmented to F#a# Infinity, by its sadness and its colorless tensions; some moments are even similar to some minimal themes from the distinct 1997 masterpiece. On the other hand, this fusion itself goes rather abstract, more inordinate. Individually, the "actors" are themselves the same neurotic players, within a difficult game of musical styles and illusions: Trudeau having the same flawless charisma, Efrim being an "interesting" singer.

As every time (keeping in mind both Godspeed and Silver Mt. Zion's further consacred moments), music is a combination of messages, lyrical or abstract influences and artistic dense thoughts. The messages, themselves, can be and can be not understood, still they are a pillar of expression and releasing, heaving the scandal or the weep, the poetry or the raw narration. The music, torn between rock, alternative, expression experimental and dark sound, it fertilized in improvised or mischievous colors, in pessimism or hurtful feelings, in empathies or apathies. The music of Silver Mt. Zion, for any fan, is full of mystery, nightmare and illusion, forming, at least, a dark, experimental, ironic or intense composition. Finally, the art of this moment is the art of a freely pointed expression and the art of intrinsic, unusual, animus rock, sounding so imposing and "harmonious". He Has Left Us Alone... has you going through feelings, shivers, dizzinesses and negative passion - and with all this, the album is "just" terrifically composed, having the pure potency of the revolted artists from Silver Mt. Zion.

Four stars. Silver Mt. Zion is a special and difficult, profound and perfidious band.