Okay, it's Godspeed You Black Emperor!, only it's not Godspeed You Black Emperor!. But it is, see? Only different, but only in a nominal sense. Not really different in a qualitative sense. Though it is different in a quantitative sense, and that's really the only difference, really.

A Silver Mt. Zion consists of the three founding members of GYBE!, Efrim, Sophie and Thierry. (Due to the marked devaluation of the Canadian Dollar, none of these musicians can afford a last name.) Efrim apparently got tired of having to work with a collective as large as Godspeed! (nine of those people, all told, and not a last name between or betwixt 'em that I can tell), so while some of the others were off making drum-and-bass records (only Canadian drum-and-bass, where you dance like the tundra thawing) Efrim called up Sophie (who, being a violinist, likely had very little in drum-and-bass records) and Thierry (who would have the oddest name ever, except he's in bands with a guy named Efrim.) And they made a Godspeed! record. Only, it's not a Godspeed! record, it's an A Silver Mt. Zion record. Which is different. Nominally.

These Godspeed! songs are not tracked the way they would be if they were Godspeed! songs. If these Godspeed! songs were Godspeed! songs there would be two of them, each with four movements. But they'd only be the two "tracks" on the album. But these Godspeed! songs aren't Godspeed! songs, they're A Silver Mt. Zion songs, so each of the parts that would have been movements of the two Godspeed! songs are tracked as individual songs themselves. That's actually kind of cool, 'cause if they were tracked in the established Godspeed! idiom you couldn't jump in between them as easily as you can now.

Oh, and Efrim sings on one of them. Kind of.

The gestalt I'm pulling off of this thing is that Efrim (and Sophie and Thierry, I suppose) had themselves a sizeable quantity of "parts" that they'd written, but they couldn't find a way to work into the movement epics of Godspeed!. So, when the other members went off to play something else, they all got together and tracked the parts that they couldn't work into feasible "songs" as the Godspeed! entity as the individual songs on the A Silver Mt. Zion entity.

It works pretty well. If you like Godspeed You Black Emperor!, um, well, buy this album. 'Cause if it wasn't not a Godspeed! record it would most certainly be a Godspeed! record. Which it kinda is anyway.

Five sponges. It's a classically great Godspeed You Black Emperor! Record, but they lose one sponge for making me write out the title, and another just for making me have to write out "A Silver Mt. Zion" so damned often without having any noticeable difference between themselves and, um, themselves.