Efrim Manuel Menuck is a luminary for many. As co-founder of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion, he has made music with which many people feel an almost fanatical connection.
I have never had that connection with either band. But ‘Our Lady of Parc Extension and Her Munificent Sorrows’, from Menuck’s forthcoming solo album High Gospel, is utterly, grippingly, compulsive-repeat-listen beautiful.
It is at heart a simple folk song. At once celebratory and melancholic (‘All we’ve got is the dust and each other’), it is as effortlessly majestic as one imagines the Canadian landscape in which Menuck now lives to be. But alongside (or, rather, above) the simple, practically one-chord structure sits layer upon layer of analogue noise, signal bending, and distorted guitar swoops. It is these, combined with Menuck’s strange, strained vocals that make ‘Our Lady’ so exciting.
High Gospel is out on Constellation on 24 May.
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