Staff Reviews

Efrim Manuel Menuck - Pissing Stars

Review by Bekki Bemrose

He takes the grandeur of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s music and distils it down to a heady, potent concentrate»

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180 Gram vinyl with artworked inner sleeve and 12”x18” art print poster plus Download. The second solo album by the co-founder of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion, following his 2011 solo debut. The brilliantly intense follow-up to his 2011 solo debut Plays “High Gospel” and the first new material with Menuck as central songwriter and vocalist since 2014’s acclaimed Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything from his chamber-punk-rock band Thee Silver Mt. Zion. The legendary Montréal-based musician has much-deserved cult status among fans of political punk, post-rock and avant-noise songcraft alike. Menuck celebrates 25 years of unflinching and uncompromising sonic output with Pissing Stars, wherein he launches acerbic darts, impassioned salvos and fragile flowers into gusts of noise-battered song built around pulsing maximalist electronics and drone, shot through with alternately plaintive, chilling, often processed vocals. Pissing Stars is Menuck at his most vulnerable and his most adventurous – with a timely narrative framework that only he could conjure: Pissing Stars is inspired by the brief romance of american television presenter Mary Hart and Mohammed Khashoggi, the son of a saudi arms dealer. This record was made in dark corners between 2016 and 2017. a very rough pair of years, shot thru with fatigue, depression, despair, and too many cigarettes and too much booze. but also = the giddiness of enervation, and the strange liberation of being emptied – borne aloft and carried by the drift. The world continues its eternal collapsing, fires everywhere and everything drained of meaning. this record was made in various states of unease, with a brittle heart and a clear intent. like running towards a cliff with 2 swinging knives, roaring with an idiot grin. overcome and overjoyed. this record is about the dissolution of the state, and all of us trapped beneath, and the way that certain stubborn lights endure.
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