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Featuring Efrim, Thierry and Sophie of the mighty Godspeed You Black Emperor!, they inhabit that same majestic twilight zone, and soundtrack horrific urban decay from their shared position at the fiercest edge of society. In the Union Chapel, the music has found its perfect setting: both are shrouded in ethereal wonder, beautifully haunting, and at once exquisite and deeply foreboding. Tonight there are six people on an unkempt stage, ushering their infinite blackness in with violins and cellos to fill this house of God. It's a vastly visionary chamber music for the terminally doomed, sparse but so pregnant with emotion, and rising inexorably to swathes of portentous orchestration. The effect is genuinely chilling, a monstrous soundscape of such depth and texture. Appropriately, the Silver Mt Zion worldview encompasses the biggest possible picture, a scope which wholly embraces their trenchant anarcho-syndicalist convictions. Because, for all their fear and loathing, and "obscene and unnatural wrong" that they see in our culture, the music ultimately radiates positivity. Efrim only once breaks from burying his head in piano or guitar, to make an endearingly fumbled attempt at communicating this hope and desire. But they create something which is more articulate than words, and which conveys more passion than any manifesto. It is wonderfully naked and organic, this symphonic delicacy which unfolds before us. The movements last up to 20 minutes, rising and falling on a ghostly whim, and have titles like '13 Angels Standing Guard 'Round The Side Of Your Bed'. These French-Canadian revolutionaries evoke some forgotten corner of 18th Century Paris, all baroque architecture, dark, artistic creations and overbearing discontent. Desperation and impending disaster never sounded so seductive. Tonight, A Silver Mt Zion are warmly inviting, yet also scary as hell. Steve |