Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra
Reitschule; Bern, Switzerland

“We just like to swear a lot,” is probably as frank an explanation of a song title as you could ever hope to hear from a frontman, and it suits the bellicose path Silver Mt. Zion have been forging of late, what with Fuck Off Get Free being a hail of fuzzed guitars and amped violins. Accordingly, their set at Bern’s Reitschule — a reclaimed horse-yard now functioning as a cultural center for people of an anarcho-socialist-communist-feminist-leftist persuasion — was coruscatingly direct, and as the opening quote implies, it began with a surge through the title track from their latest. And it didn’t end there, since the band thrashed out renditions of every other track on the album, reveling in their migration from the plaintive elegies of yesteryear to the indignant tirades of the present.

Moving from “Fuck Off Get Free,” they bullied “Austerity Blues” and “Early Grave Blues,” producing voluminous walls of sound that fattened as they were increasingly reminded of everything that pisses them off from day to day. “Austerity Blues” was introduced as a tribute to, “How the rich keep wanting more, and the poor keep getting less,” and though the sheer force of the assault threatened to singe ears, the space provided by the live setting allowed the heavily FX’d violins of Sophie Trudeau and Jessica Moss to take the foreground, wherein they could venture into and explore new melodic territory, territory that radiated the quintet’s inimitable fusion of sorrow, vitriol, melancholy, and determination.

In fact, it’s this inclusivity and openness that’s one of the most striking aspects of the Mt. Zion live set. The band were assembled in a symmetrical V formation, with Trudeau and Moss opposite each other at the front, Menuck and Thierry Amar mirroring each other in the row behind, and finally David Payant manning the drums at the V’s tip. Coupled with the fact that each member is equipped with a mic for vocals, this arrangement subtly communicates their ideals of equality and democracy, which they also artfully manage to unify with the ideals of individuality and individual expression evoked by the deeply personal laments of each instrument. This marriage was borne out when, after the escalating heat of “Austerity Blues,” Menuck confessed its blurry ending is “all noise, it’s all just noise; we’re all just making [self-absorbed, uncoordinated] noise,” but that they nonetheless end together as a unanimous entity, since they “look at each other, and we go 1, 2, 3, 4 — uh, the end.”

Outside of the gracefully punishing Fuck Off Get Free material, they treated the audience to Kollaps Tradixionales closer “Piphany Rambler,” and to newie “All Their Kings Are Dead,” another prolonged, transcendent punk jam that showcases an aggravated breakdown and newfound taste for semi-falsetto vocal hooks. Yet despite the energy streaming out of the amplifiers the Swiss crowd were, for whatever reason, a little polite in their applause, with Menuck at one point asking them, “Is everything OK, what the fuck is going on? Are you guys alright?” Regardless, the band said goodbye to them with a powerful, St. Valentine’s version of “What We Loved Was Not Enough.” And for me at least, this was more than enough.

Setlist:

01. Fuck Off Get Free (For the Island of Montreal)
02. Austerity Blues
03. Rains Thru the Roof at the Grande Ballroom (For Capital Steez)
04. Early Grave Blues
05. ‘Piphany Rambler
06. All Their Kings Are Dead
07. What We Loved Was Not Enough

Encore: Little Ones Run

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