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**★★★★☆**

In the wake of Godspeed You! Black Emperor's indefinite hiatus circa 2003, the post-rock landscape felt suddenly bereft of its most vital voice. Enter Efrim Menuck, the collective's spiritual architect, who had already begun nurturing a more intimate vessel for his apocalyptic visions. A Silver Mt. Zion's third full-length offering—bearing the characteristically unwieldy title "He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Sometimes Grace The Corner Of Our Rooms..."—stands as perhaps the most cohesive statement from this Montreal collective, a work that bridges the orchestral grandeur of their earlier incarnation with something more nakedly human.

Recorded in the shadow of global uncertainty and personal upheaval, this 2000 release finds Menuck grappling with themes of abandonment, hope, and the search for meaning in an increasingly fractured world. The album emerges from the same fertile Montreal scene that birthed Godspeed, yet where that ensemble dealt in cinematic vastness, Silver Mt. Zion operates on a more chamber-music scale—though no less emotionally devastating for its restraint.

The opening salvo, "Sit In The Middle Of Three Galloping Dogs," immediately establishes the album's modus operandi: a slow-burning 13-minute odyssey that begins with Menuck's fragile falsetto floating over skeletal guitar arpeggios before erupting into a cathartic wall of distorted strings and thunderous percussion. It's a template that recalls Talk Talk's final albums—that same sense of space being gradually filled until it threatens to burst. Jessica Moss's violin work here deserves particular praise, weaving between melodic anchor and textural atmosphere with remarkable fluidity.

But it's "Mountains Made Of Steam" that serves as the album's emotional centrepiece, a devastating meditation on loss that builds from whispered confessions to full-throated anguish. Menuck's lyrics—"The government's coming and we're all gonna die"—might scan as paranoid rambling in lesser hands, but his delivery imbues them with genuine pathos. The song's climactic section, where multiple violins swirl around Sophie Trudeau's cello like vultures, ranks among the most powerful moments in the post-rock canon.

The album's genius lies in its understanding of dynamics—not just the loud-quiet-loud formula that had already calcified into cliché, but emotional dynamics. "13 Angels Standing Guard 'Round The Side Of Your Bed" offers rare moments of genuine tenderness, Menuck's vocals multitracked into an angelic chorus that provides respite from the surrounding storm. Meanwhile, "Broken Chords Can Sing A Little" strips everything back to just voice and guitar, a folk song that wouldn't sound out of place on a Townes Van Zandt record if not for its underlying sense of cosmic dread.

Sonically, the album benefits from a production approach that favours warmth over clinical precision. The guitars retain their natural resonance, the strings breathe with organic life, and Menuck's vocals—often his weakest link—are mixed with just enough reverb to mask their technical limitations while preserving their emotional immediacy. There's a lived-in quality to these recordings that suggests songs born from necessity rather than artistic ambition.

The influence of this album on subsequent generations of post-rock and indie artists cannot be overstated. Bands from Mono to Explosions In The Sky have borrowed liberally from its template of patient build-ups and cathartic releases, though few have matched its emotional authenticity. More significantly, it demonstrated that the post-rock genre could accommodate human voices without sacrificing its essential character—a lesson that would prove crucial as the movement evolved beyond its initial instrumental orthodoxy.

Today, "He Has Left Us Alone..." endures as a high-water mark for both A Silver Mt. Zion and the broader Montreal scene. While the band would continue releasing albums of varying quality throughout the 2000s and beyond, none quite captured the perfect storm of vulnerability and power that defines this release. It's an album that demands patience—these songs unfold on their own timeline, indifferent to modern attention spans—but rewards the committed listener with moments of transcendent beauty.

In an era when post-rock has largely retreated into safe formulas and Instagram-friendly crescendos, this album serves as a reminder of the genre's capacity for genuine emotional weight. It's music for the end times that somehow manages to locate hope