"This Is Our Punk Rock," Thee Rusted Satellites Gather + Sing

Title: "This is Our Punk Rock," Thee Rusted Satellites Gather + Sing
Artist: A Silver Mt. Zion
Release Date: August 2003
Score: 10/10
Link: http://www.filestube.com/7tFl7R0gXtMkuhEUlLcx7V/A-Silver-Mt-Zion-This-Is-Our-Punk-Rock-Thee-Rusted-Satellites-Gather-Sing.html












Like any good album, Rusted Satellites evokes its own unique blend of emotion and brings back powerful memories. To me, this album is waking up on a school day to an empty home and finding your lawn strewn with rubbish. Initially you scold your dog for making the mess and set to picking it all up. As the refuse of used diapers and by-gone foodstuffs permeates your senses, the haunting chanting in Sow Some Lonesome Corner So Many Flowers Bloom reaches a cacophonous peak. And just as the chanting peaks you come to the realisation that the bags have no visible tears and your dog was chained up last night. The slight against your house was performed by your neighbours, a foul act of betrayal that will cling to your music for the rest of your life like a bad stench.

Sow Some Lonesome Corner is the start of what I recognise as one of the greatest post-rock albums of all time. To me, greatness in any genre comes not from instrumental skill but uniqueness and originality, and this album displays nothing but those traits. The advent of chanting for the first half of a song at the time was something barely seen in this subsect of the genre, the most interesting part being that it's not a heavily tuned or practiced choir, merely a ragtag group of voices clinging together for warmth and instantly adding to the value of the album's experience. The violin-centric movement stemming from the chant's end carries the waft of that awfully reminiscient Godspeed sound, the mark of Sophie Trudeau, a true artisan. The first song climaxes perfectly as all good post-rock should and gently lets us back down into the raging emotional tempest that is the second track.
 
Babylon was built on fire and the bones of useless machines.Once again bringing back that beautiful Black Emperor sound comes Babylon was Built on Fire/Starsnostars. Reminiscient not necessarily in terms of instrumentation, but in its bleak style of doomsaying. Sophie once again carries the song through the charred imagery of its repeated lyrics. Efrim's tone gradually rises from a lullaby to screaming impending terror whilst still maintaining a simplified, childlike vocabulary.
Citizens in their homes and missiles in their holes.
He compacts such devastating concepts and themes into tiny, barely managable pieces to distill and protect us from the unrelenting onslaught of his fear over the top of plucked harmonies, increasing tempo and a violent violin vomiting vitriol all over the remains of our dreams. The sheer power in such a downtempo song is absolutely beyond my comprehension.

American Motor over Smoldered Field takes the post-apocalyptic feel of Starsnostars and blows it completely out of the water with a blatant hate speech toward an anonymous authoritative figure and mashes it together with more wanton fear for the future. Lets just examine the name of the song for full impact; American Motor Over Smoldered Field. The sheer implications stemming from such an oddly specific song title are staggering, and that's before the wave of discomfort from the lyrics kicks in. 
Bullets in the bellies of babies, sleeping in the strangest places.Already Efrim has spun an uncomfortable piece of imagery within our minds to accompany the slow rise of the music. This pattern continues up until halfway through the song, providing the perfect build-up for what can only be described as one of the most powerful climaxes in music. The guitar and violin blend together in perfect harmony to accompany the drums in emulating a powerful train, slowly mowing through a miniature town that lies helpless beneath the steam powered leviathan. It radiates energy as it gradually speeds up, taking all of the album's fearful build-up and transforming it inside a furnace for fuel to keep the wheels turning as long as possible. Toward the end of the climax, just before it winds down we can witness the truly beautiful phenomena of a very subtle slowing in playing speed almost as though the engine has burnt its last reserves and is about to come to a crashing halt. After the wreckage we can hear that beautifully faint chanting reaching a crescendo as we return to the song's original melody. Rising from the ashes, as though revived through primordial chant we can witness the sheer prominence of Sophie's violin pulling the rest of the instruments out until we eventually here Efrim begin with his trembling verse. 
This fence around your garden won't keep the ice from falling.
Once again he returns to his speech designed to cut down, only now instead of uplifting and strong it's but a shambling shell of its former self made beautiful by the trembling in his voice, you can almost hear the tears.

Such a powerful album always needs to end on a positive note lest we all kill ourselves out of vicarious anguish. The path Rusted Satellites takes is the one of the happy goodbye. We can still hear the trembling of fear in Efrim's voice but this time it's that of a survivor, not a victim. Goodbye Desolate Railyard contains perhaps my favourite Godspeed You! Black Emperor nostalgia; that of the traintracks they recorded by. The very song sounds like a train-crushed penny falling from a F#A#∞ record, it reminds me of that gorgeous horn interrupting the dreamlike spell of The Dead Flag Blues. But perhaps the most powerful use of the railroad is the connotation of riding a train home. Sophie's violin once again carries us off away from the carnage of the album and back home into a safe place. The horrible dream is over and there was nothing to fear all along. As Efrim calmly states in the only instance of non-discordant singing present on the album;

Everybody gets a little lost sometimes.