Set Fire To Flames: Sings Reign Rebuilder

SET FIRE TO FLAMES: SINGS REIGN REBUILDER (2001)

1) ʽI Will Be True...ʼ (From Lips Of Lying Dying Wonder Body #1)/Reign Rebuilder [Head]; 2) Vienna Arcweld/Fucked Gamelan/Rigid Tracking; 3) Steal Compass/Drive North/Disappear; 4) Wild Dogs Of The Thunderbolt/ʽThey Cannot Lock Me Up... I Am Eternally Free...ʼ (From Lips Of Lying Dying Wonder Body #2); 5) Omaha; 6) There Is No Dance In Frequency And Balance; 7) Côte DʼAbrahams Roomtone/ʽWhatʼs Going On?...ʼ (From Lips Of Lying Dying Wonder Body #3); 8) Love Song For 15 Ontario (w/ Singing Police Car); 9) Injur: Gutted Two-Track; 10) When I First Get To Phoenix; 11) Shit-Heap-Gloria Of The New Town Planning...; 12) Jesus/Pop; 13) Esquimalt Harbour; 14) Two Tears In A Bucket; 15) Fading Lights Are Fading.../Reign Rebuilder [Tail Out].

General verdict: Conceptually sound, emotionally hollow — loneliness and lament taken to almost ridiculous heights of boredom.

If Silver Mt. Zion was largely the brainchild of Efrim Menuck, then the second largest split-off side project off Godspeed You! Black Emperor mainly owed its existence to David Bryant and Mike Moya, the bandʼs other two guitarists. Just like Silver Mt. Zion, this one was formed in order to explore ideas and concepts that did not quite fit in with GY!BEʼs standard megalo-vision, and you can see that right from the circumstances in which their first LP was recorded. To do it, the 13 musicians constituting this band moved into a decrepit century-old two-story building that was already marked for demolition — and ended up with a largely improvised 73 minute-long piece of musique concrète, combining minimalistic melodies with all sorts of ambient sounds, from creaking floors to dripping taps to passing cars.

The artistic goals of such an enterprise are fairly obvious — in fact, they are not that much different from the goals of either GY!BE as such or Silver Mt. Zion: most of these guysʼ work represents a never-ending lament for the passing of things. Signs Reign Rebuilder invites us to a rather lengthy mourning service, in which the main acting is rather evenly split between man and the very things that man has both given birth to and then discarded without thinking. As Paul McCartney said it thirty years earlier, "why, why, says the junk in the yard". Here, the junk is given its own voice, and the musicians are assembled to amplify it and make it heard, without ever passing judgement on anything — after all, birth and death do constitute the natural cycle of life, so this is all about mourning, never about accusing.

Unfortunately, while the concept certainly works on an intellectual level, I am not entirely sure what it would take to make it work on a purely sensory one. For example, already the second track here consists of about 13 minutes of relatively quiet noise — much of it sounding like somebody is dragging an empty pail across a path of gravel, then trying to tune up a completely dysfunctional radio, then using a cello to imitate the squeaking of a rusty see-saw. Eventually, some percussion joins in the «fun» to add dynamics and maybe even a bit of a crescendo to bring things to a boil, but this is way too small a pay-off for ten minutes of your life which you may have wasted trying to find spiritual nirvana in the abovementioned sounds.

If you remember the concept, it can all make sense and receive a plausible interpretation, but, putting it mildly, it ainʼt much fun to listen to, and I am using the broadest understanding of «fun» that can be applied to such cases. That Sings Reign Rebuilder is not about particularly catchy or particularly complex melodies is obviously understood; it should certainly all be about mood-setting atmosphere. The problem is, it is difficult to generate startling or simply impressive atmosphere if your rules require you to restrict yourself to slow, quiet, repetitive guitar and/or string-based dirges and looped tapes of whatever creaking, hissing, grumbling, or scratching sounds your ear might catch in the confines of your dilapidated environment. It is probably not impossible, but it is difficult, and the way I see it, Set Fire To Flames have not truly risen up to this challenge. Over the course of two listens, not a single moment on the album has managed to specifically grab my attention.

At their best, Set Fire To Flames sound like a slightly hushed-down and largely unnecessary version of GY!BE themselves — check ʽSteal Compassʼ, a six-minute crescendo that uses the GY!BE formula, but forgets to invent a strong theme and fails to generate the necessary energy, even when the obligatory echoey guitar trills begin electrifying the space around you... then just fizzle out in disillusioned impotence. If it was meant to be that way, itʼs OK with me, but, again, only on a cold rational level — like a torch-bearer for all the mediocrity in this world that strives to be big and fails midway through. Even worse are the ten minutes of ʽShit-Heap-Gloria Of The New Town Planningʼ (where do they come up with all these titles?), which suffer from the exact same flaws except... well, ten minutes. For Godʼs sake, guys, the world does not really need you doing the same stuff that you can do so much better in a larger format.

Even so, this is Set Fire To Flames at their best. At their worst, they might sound like a young string trio tuning up (ʽTwo Tears In A Bucketʼ), or they might simply clog your audiospace with looped sounds of helicopter blades (ʽ Côte DʼAbrahams Roomtoneʼ) or something like that. The bad news is, it does not translate into any sort of cohesive experience. I would love to be able to visualize yet another devastated post-apocalyptic landscape from what I am being offered, but there is simply nothing too haunting about these sounds. Everything sounds so improvised that I wouldnʼt be surprised to learn they made it all up in 24 hours, not a single minute of which involved any fleeting inspiration (update: apparently, it took them five days, which is really not that much different from 24 hours in the grand scheme of things). Alas, the result is a disaster, even if quite a few contemporary reviews were glowing at the time (like a 9 from Pitchfork, with the reviewer gloating over the sonic construction of the record as if heʼd never previously heard anything that sounded like it). Well, Silver Mt. Zion 1 : Set Fire To Flames 0, I have to say.