Efrim Manuel Menuck Plays "High Gospel"

Following their warmly received reunion at the end of last year, you would have thought that Efrim Manuel Menuck would have been busying himself with a new Godspeed You! Black Emperor record. But apparently, amongst the tour-dates he's somehow managed to find the time to fit in the recording of his first solo album as well.

Presumably this was possible as Plays “High Gospel” didn't take particularly long to write, it running to a rather trim eight tracks, half of which can be dismissed in a sentence; august four, year-of-our-lord blues and heaven's engine is a dusty ol' bellows are merely heavily reverbed guitar doodles, while chickadees roar pt. 2 and heavy calls & hospitals blues both sound like out-takes from the first record by Godspeed spin-off act Silver Mt. Zion. To extend the description to a second sentence, it's worth noting that the latter track, a simple number for piano and voice, does see him in a better mood than usual - there may be the occasional bits of unfocused despair that he's known for, such as 'hospitals and heavy calls / and other symptoms of our age', but the emphasis placed on the line 'your pretty daughter's sleeping / there's beauty in this world' suggests an older, wiser and generally more positive Menuck.

Thankfully the other half of Plays "High Gospel" sees him trying out ideas that aren't much like either of his two bands. our lady of parc extension and her munificent sorrows may climax with some very Godspeed-esque violin, but before then it's a sweet boy-girl duet (well, as sweet as anything can sound delivered in Menuck's drunken Joe Strummer drawl and buried under distortion and fifties sci-fi style sound-effects). And, getting past the brilliant title (even if the album's lack of capitalisation is a little annoying) 12-pt. program for keep on keepin' on is Lars Von Trier's Antichrist set to music, mixing crickets and bird song with a sinister electronic voice that sounds like its sucking the life out of everything it touches, there's even an equivalent for the film's borderline misogyny in Menuck's multi-tracked chanting of 'you cuckold'. Although that only covers the first part of the track, as somewhere over its nine minute length it mutes into a glitchy samba like an especially ragged version of Doves' There Goes the Fear. But while both tracks may be interesting and full of ideas, they don't make for a particularly easy listen.

Even less pleasurable is kaddish for chesnutt, another slowly shifting piece, featuring distant moaning and largely indecipherable lyrics sung with several Silver Mt. Zion members ('and the strains of life' pops up several times, the rest are howled to the point of being indistinguishable). But then, as a kaddish is a Jewish prayer frequently used in mourning and it's a tribute to the late singer-songwriter and Silver Mount Zion collaborator Vic Chesnutt, it would be inappropriate if it was any less grim.

However, the same can't be said for the final track, i am no longer a motherless child, which may be the only time in his career that Menuck's ever attempted to go for all out joy. After a burst of Jimi-Hendrix-does-the-star-spangled-banner style guitar, it shifts into a looped flute accompanied by a lyric extolling the joys of fatherhood. While it's doubtful that he was aiming for such comparisons it does sound rather like Animal Collective at their least self conscious, and is something of a delight.

Fans of Menuck's other bands should find something to appreciate here (kudos to him for managing to hit on styles very much distinct from his past work, even if he only does so occasionally). But as Plays "High Gospel" merely provides an EP's worth of interesting ideas, filling out the rest of its running time with several pretty but half-done sketches, it feels a little ungenerous.