Thalia Zedek should be so well acclaimed by now that she's reached some sort
of venerable status, but let's just be glad she isn't, and hasn't. Rather
than resting back on ill-gotten laurels, content that her time in the
sun has been and gone, Zedek is still shrouded in her aesthetic darkness,
is still hungry, still driven; her music is still driven by the same
ghosts that've haunted her throughout her career; her personal, passionate,
painful take on some sort of art-rock "blues" is still driven by demons
that've marked her work from Dangerous Birds through Uzi, Live Skull,
Come, and, finally, onto her solo albums. When she sings "the
ocean's thirst won't shrink" at the end of a profound couplet at the center of
the storm that is "Sailor," it's easy to think of the metaphor extending to her
own work; the allusions to Coleridge go by the wayside as Zedek sails on, forging
further into an artistry whose passions haven't been satiated by time. The song
itself is pure passion, Zedek's raw, ragged, vivid voice playing with old-timey
high-seas imagery as Daniel Coughlin's drums — forever pushed to the fore — swell
around her with splashing cymbals, and David Michael's viola flutters like the
flags at the top of the mast quivering in whipping winds; there's a ferocity
here that mirrors both the fury of nature and the determination of the men who
fight it. It's loaded with tensions, tensions that're played out in fashions
more profound than just tension/release; the song stops in lulls, then explodes,
creating a sense of drama without turning to melodrama. It's the grandest moment
on Trust Not Those in Whom/Without Some Touch of Madness, Zedek's curiously
titled third solo longplayer, a disc that found her gathered trio heading north
of the border to Montréal and entering the enclave of the Constellation
collective, recording at the Hotel2Tango, place that's birthed all that Godspeed!
gear. Having toured and joined in on jamborees with Godspeed You! Black Emperor
and Molasses in recent seasons, Zedek is less dallying outsider, more visiting
out-of-towner; and I'd hesitate to suggest that, as far as traded inspiration
goes, the soldiers in the GY!BE army have drawn more from her, drawing inspiration
from Zedek's quarter-century of marring artistic beauty and punk-rock spirit.
And long may she sail. |
