If you’re going to call a song “I Built Myself a Metal Bird, I Fed My Metal Bird the Wings of Other Metal Birds” you best not take yourself too seriously. Thankfully, Thee Silver Mt. Zion — sorry but I’m only typing out an 11-word band title once per page — proved to be in the best of humour on Saturday night, despite the “psychedelic” level swelter inside a sold-out Lee’s. Supporting their latest album, 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons, by performing mostly other material (including the aforementioned new “Metal Bird” number), the Montreal septet exhibited what fans have long decoded: beneath the activist, art-school posture is a group that first and foremost wants to engage and entertain.
The arrangement of members in a semi-circle on stage could not detract from the fact that Efrim Menuck (of godspeed you! black emperor fame) is leader of this pack. You could tell by the way his bandmates looked at him to steer the navigation of their epic songs. Or the way his barbed-wire vocal litanies ripped through the bewitching, delicate choir of Sophie Trudeau, Jessica Moss and Becky Foon (also providing violin, violin and cello, respectively). Or the way he kept the crowd in stitches while the musicians wiped the sweat from their instruments between songs. Seriously, Menuck told so many jokes his act could have been called Thee Silver Mount Catskills.
One particularly fine set weaved quips about Obama, Triumph, Steven Harper and the beauty of free band towels. (Although saying that the Nirvana show he was privileged enough to witness at Lee’s back in 1990 was “pretty dumb” didn’t get many laughs.) At the point when rosin started to melt off Thierry Amar’s double bass bow, Menuck even took an audience vote on whether they should break and go outside to cool off.
The crowd voted overwhelming to continue in suffering, so enraptured they were with the live versions of favourites such as “Microphones in the Trees” and 13 Blues’ “1,000,000 Died to Make This Sound.” While each composition was a perfectly orchestrated wave of tension-release that compressed an album’s worth of ideas into 15 minutes, stringing the very similar “hits” together had a certain dulling effect. The real star of the proceedings was the newest member, drummer Eric Craven, whose effortless, forceful crescendos had at least one boy in the audience lifting his skinny fists like antennae to heaven and throwing up the horns like he was at a Who show. Later, another new track, “There is a Light” had couples swaying. Hmmm. Could the upcoming album (tentatively titled Fuck You Drakula) have drum solos and power ballads? I know, I know. There are still some things this group doesn’t joke about.