Reviews
"Following Godspeed You! Black Emperor's much vaunted return and a series of consistently excellent releases under Thee Silver Mt. Zion moniker, a relatively low-key solo record is perhaps the last thing anyone expected from Menuck but thankfully, Plays 'High Gospel' more than delivers. Indeed, this is amongst the most varied and intensely personal music of his career, veering from schizophrenic sonic collages to incredibly uplifting, emotionally direct songcraft."
Rock Sound (UK)
"Efrim Menuck has had a widely respected career with Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Silver Mt. Zion but he continues to evolve album to album, almost song to song. With his solo debut, Menuck doesn’t shy away from anything. With Plays 'High Gospel', Menuck’s own emotions radiate throughout, allowing a more personal connection to the audience. I’d like to think that he took the opportunity to create the most unfiltered and soul-fulfilling creative piece that he could conceive. With only half of the album featuring vocals, the other half serving as rich interludes, the Gospel of Efrim Manuel Menuck is a series of hymns worth preaching."
The Big Takeover
"Genuinely new and exciting, burning with purpose and most definitely worth forty minutes of anyone's time... Menuck's approach to his instrument is more experimental here, re-amping and multi-tracking, combining delays, distortion and compression to create subtly billowing clouds of pink noise; in fact, the guitar accounts for a relatively small part of a sonic palette that also includes field recordings, tape manipulations, electronics, organ and piano. When Menuck ties all these strands together, the results are mesmerising."
The Quietus
"Efrim has been one of the most important figures in Canadian music for over ten years. He shows incredible ability to create moods/tones/textures [and] continues to make some of the most satisfying, unique and original music today. Not one to ignore, nor one to put on in the background. Pay attention to this one, or you will surely miss the beauty that it is."
Beatroute
"‘Our Lady of Parc Extension and Her Munificent Sorrows’, from Menuck’s forthcoming solo album Plays 'High Gospel', is utterly, grippingly, compulsive-repeat-listen beautiful. It is at heart a simple folk song. At once celebratory and melancholic (‘All we’ve got is the dust and each other’), it is as effortlessly majestic as one imagines the Canadian landscape in which Menuck now lives to be. But alongside (or, rather, above) the simple, practically one-chord structure sits layer upon layer of analogue noise, signal bending, and distorted guitar swoops. It is these, combined with Menuck’s strange, strained vocals that make ‘Our Lady’ so exciting.
Line Of Best Fit (Song Of The Day)
"Plays 'High Gospel' is a record of strife and surmounting, of findings...This music, I think, was imagined in a city. Our backs to concrete, we could use its help."
Said The Gramophone
Rock Sound (UK)
"Efrim Menuck has had a widely respected career with Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Silver Mt. Zion but he continues to evolve album to album, almost song to song. With his solo debut, Menuck doesn’t shy away from anything. With Plays 'High Gospel', Menuck’s own emotions radiate throughout, allowing a more personal connection to the audience. I’d like to think that he took the opportunity to create the most unfiltered and soul-fulfilling creative piece that he could conceive. With only half of the album featuring vocals, the other half serving as rich interludes, the Gospel of Efrim Manuel Menuck is a series of hymns worth preaching."
The Big Takeover
"Genuinely new and exciting, burning with purpose and most definitely worth forty minutes of anyone's time... Menuck's approach to his instrument is more experimental here, re-amping and multi-tracking, combining delays, distortion and compression to create subtly billowing clouds of pink noise; in fact, the guitar accounts for a relatively small part of a sonic palette that also includes field recordings, tape manipulations, electronics, organ and piano. When Menuck ties all these strands together, the results are mesmerising."
The Quietus
"Efrim has been one of the most important figures in Canadian music for over ten years. He shows incredible ability to create moods/tones/textures [and] continues to make some of the most satisfying, unique and original music today. Not one to ignore, nor one to put on in the background. Pay attention to this one, or you will surely miss the beauty that it is."
Beatroute
"‘Our Lady of Parc Extension and Her Munificent Sorrows’, from Menuck’s forthcoming solo album Plays 'High Gospel', is utterly, grippingly, compulsive-repeat-listen beautiful. It is at heart a simple folk song. At once celebratory and melancholic (‘All we’ve got is the dust and each other’), it is as effortlessly majestic as one imagines the Canadian landscape in which Menuck now lives to be. But alongside (or, rather, above) the simple, practically one-chord structure sits layer upon layer of analogue noise, signal bending, and distorted guitar swoops. It is these, combined with Menuck’s strange, strained vocals that make ‘Our Lady’ so exciting.
Line Of Best Fit (Song Of The Day)
"Plays 'High Gospel' is a record of strife and surmounting, of findings...This music, I think, was imagined in a city. Our backs to concrete, we could use its help."
Said The Gramophone
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Description
Efrim Manuel Menuck is best known as co-founder of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, leader of agit-chamber-punk group Thee Silver Mt. Zion, and member of the Vic Chesnutt Band (2007-2009); he has a combined thirteen albums under his belt with these three groups. He is also co-founder of Montreal's Hotel2Tango recording studio, with dozens of recording, arranging and guest playing credits to his name, for a list of artists as diverse as British Sea Power, Carla Bozulich's Evangelista, and Grant Hart.Fans of Menuck will be well versed in his highly original and constantly evolving approach to the sound of the electric guitar – a unique combination of short and long analog delays, biting compression and blown-out clouds of pink noise distortion. His recasting of various folkways through the lens of uncompromising punk-rock is also well-documented in the discography of Thee Silver Mt. Zion, with that band's use of poetically political group singing set against a hybrid of damaged blues, waltz, klezmer and folk instrumental tropes.
Perhaps less appreciated is Menuck's work as an inventive signal-bender and sound-sculptor, with an overriding commitment to analog processing, tape manipulations, re-amping and other iterative strategies. Efrim's aesthetic and techniques remain about as diametrically opposite to the dominant Pro-Tools and DSP culture as it gets for someone working in contemporary multi-tracked rock composition and production.
Efrim Manuel Menuck Plays "High Gospel" rallies all of these talents and sensibilities to deliver a powerful and personal album that serves as an ode to his adopted Montreal hometown (where he has now lived for two decades), the passing of great friends (Vic Chesnutt, Emma) and new fatherhood. Entirely self-produced and tracked at various Montreal locations, the album offers a confident, focused, humble and enveloping song cycle.
The droning, mangled electric guitar beds that underpin group-vocal melodies and dive-bombing electronics on the album’s opening track, and the hauntingly processed field recordings and ominous tape-delayed sound-sculpture of "a 12-pt. program for keep on keepin’ on", establish Menuck’s inimitable sonic palette in uncompromising and inspired style. "12-pt. program" ends in a glorious squall of soaring tones and distorted breakcore beats that yield to the ensuing song's intimate yet wide-screen suite for electric guitar and violin (courtesy Silver Mt. Zion bandmate and partner Jessica Moss). "heavy calls & hospitals blues" closes Side 1 with a simple piano-based ballad that harkens back to Efrim's vocal debut on the first Silver Mt. Zion album in 1999.
The first three songs on Side 2 deploy otherwordly ambience against repeating and contrapuntal melodies filtered through various pedal chains, occupying a distinctive interzone between electronic music and instrumental rock. In the second of these,"kaddish for chesnutt”, Efrim astonishes with lyrics that convey a profound intimacy with Vic, celebrating his life and death in unflinching eulogy. The final scorched-earth solo guitar figures that introduce "i am no longer a motherless child" relent to organ and keyboard oscillations and what is perhaps the most unabashedly celebratory pop song Menuck has ever produced, propelled by a wide-eyed, joyous, deeply proud (and existentially relieved?) vocal that is all chorus: the song title sung over and over....
Thanks for listening.
Running time: 41:01
Release date: 24 May 2011
Packaging Notes
CD comes in a custom gatefold jacket printed on 100% recycled CCNB paperboard in full colour with a matte UV varnish and a full colour printed CD sleeve on reverse 9pt cardstock. CD also includes a 4"x8" fold-out lyric sheet.LP is pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal (Germany) and comes in a jacket printed in full colour on thick 24pt board with matte UV varnish. LP comes with a limited edition 10"x20" art print poster and a CD copy of the album. LP also includes an 8"x8" colour insert card and 4"x8" fold-out lyric sheet.
Front cover painting of Efrim & Ezra by Corri-Lynn Tetz. Back cover handset in vintage wood type at Popolo Press by Kiva Tanya Stimac. CD gatefold/LP insert collage handmade by Jessica Moss.
Tracklist
1. our lady of parc extension and her munificent sorrows2. a 12-pt. program for keep on keepin' on
3. august four, year-of-our-lord blues
4. heavy calls & hospital blues
5. heaven's engine is a dusty ol' bellows
6. kaddish for chesnutt
7. chickadees' roar pt. 2
8. i am no longer a motherless child
Credits
Written. played and recorded by Efrim Manuel Menuck at Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango, P.J. Mansions and Bloomfield Acres, Montreal, 2010-2011.GUESTSKatie Moore: vocals on TRACK 1
David Payant: drums on TRACKS 1, 2, 8
Jessica Moss: violin on TRACKS 1, 3, 8
CHORALE ON TRACK 6: Thierry Amar, Nadia & Jessica Moss, David Payant
Mastered by Harris Newman.
