the new Silver Mt Zion album is outstanding...

I'd like to hear more about this (rather than the ASMZ thing).

There's such desperation to it - the first song is amazing, that whole "I lost some friends to marriage i lost some friends to pills etc etc" part. Some other songs are like Polyphonic Spree in reverse! ARE Weapons as sadcore! Bizarro world Cure!

Between this and the new Mars Volta I guess I better get ready to start losing some friends myself, but I was actually taken aback by both albums. Very impressed.

ha, this line sounded really familiar to me, and I just spent ages trying to figure out where I'd head it before...then remembered that I saw SMtZ at ATP in december. And yes, they were amazing. I need to get this album.

Yeah, it's another good one. They've come full circle now, starting with sparse instrumentation and solemn arrangement, moving onto a full band setup and lots of GYBE-esque noise, then stripped things back somewhat and added more vocals, and now they're back to sparse instrumentation again (albeit with different instruments compared to the first record) and hippie vocal mantras.

The new one is another classic. I can't get enough of this mantric, despairing sound. I'm even getting to like Efrim's vocals, which is quite surprising.

The chances of a GYBE reunion get slimmer every year so this is the next best thing. Immense.

ya it kicks ass, "metal bird" especially. honestly fuck a godspeed reunion, smz are the best live band in the world.

It really is good, I'd actually written them off after the first two albums (not because of anything they were doing wrong, I'd just grown really tired of that sort of music around the time) but I'm really glad I was sent a promo for this one.

I never liked post-rock much to begin with but the first two albums from ASMZ definitely made an impact on me. Granted I was 16 when they came out but 2001 was a bookend year for me. It felt like the end of an innocent and careless era in my life and ASMZ was a very apt soundtrack for it.

The aircrash theme in the debut had a different effect in a pre-9/11 world but in retrospective it was very unfortunate and in a certain bad taste a year later. You have titles and lyrics referencing “airplanes going down”, “doomed airliners” and “fallen towers”. Of course it was not their intent but it changed the context of the record for me, it was hard to not relate both experiences seeing how close to each other they were in times and themes.

In other things: I just can’t stand Efrin’s voice in the subsequent records. The first two have a good balance between instrumentals and vocals but good those nasal vocals and those lyrics, which are clearly not as deep as they think they are, are the most disposable thing in every album of theirs.