Thee Silver Mt Zion Orchestra — Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything

Now entering its mid-teens, Thee Silver Mt Zion Orchestra has once again reemerged from hibernation in Quebec to remind us of the importance of preparing a fairer world for our children. 'Fuck Off...', their seventh full-length release, is perhaps their most punk in both stance and sound, despite previous attempts to emphasise anarchic leanings, especially with their overtly titled third album "This is our Punk Rock".

But even that album from 2003, comprised of just four epic tracks, was arguably interchangeable with what most of the members were contributing to the band's more famous older brother, Godspeed You Black Emperor, at the time. As if to wash themselves of the corporate dirt sprayed on them in the last couple of years following the surprise Godspeed reunion, which saw them finally giving in to being courted by mainstream media such as The Guardian, followed by public displays of awkwardness on winning an industry award (2013's Polaris Music Prize), Thee Silver Mt Zion's latest has a rougher, almost garage-y mix, bearing more anger, might and noise than their previous more epic and elegiac performances. And, given our global leaders' austerity measures self-assuredly marching even harder on the heads the poor, it's all the better for it.

It opens with the album's title track, a child's voice introducing their manifesto ("we make a lot of noise because we love each other") before a blazing wall of guitars and strident drums fire up a rallying anthem. Lead vocalist and guitarist Efrim takes the podium to complain: "Our cities groan beneath the rain / While pennies pile the hoarders smile and proclaim / That what we want will never be". Fiery violins and group singing thicken the mix into a joyfully, defiant march, wounded but filled with energy as they jubilantly cry a fervent coda of "Hold me under bright water never let us end". It's difficult to see where they can go from such heights, and so instead of trying to top the explosive welcome, the second track, 'Austerity Blues', sees a simmering bed of guitars steadily build into a bonfire of spitting cymbals and violin flares before heading out on a seriously propulsive motorik highway. Getting faster and faster, eventually the road disappears under gentler strings that float us gracefully upwards as the singers pray "Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down".

'Take Away These Early Grave Blues', a fast-paced polemical punk folk hoedown, keeps the flags whipping wildly in their bracing wind of fury and fight until 'Little Ones' finally affords the listener respite from the seemingly unstoppable, supernova-scale energies of the preceding half-hour. A gentle ballad sung by violinists Jessica Moss and Sophie Trudeau, it's sparse piano threading through soft droning strings to form a nursery blanket offset against less comfortable lyrics admitting "The big ones hunt, the little ones / And the little ones run."

The penultimate track, 'What We Loved Was Not Enough', is perhaps the closest we come to Godspeed territory, it's an extended waltz, a swaying shanty, that sounds like a grande finale wher it's easy to imagine a cast of characters coming together to take their final well-earned bows in front of a sea of lighters held respectfully aloft before the curtains draw to a close.

Even though the behaviours of Western societies have remained consistently greed-focussed and competitively exclusive across dear Silver Mt Zion Orchestra's 15-year lifespan, the band still manage to shine a bright light of hope with their music, fuelled by a passionate and healthy righteousness and a unique idiosyncratic take on protest music. When things are getting worse, it doesn't get much better than this.