Pitchfork

These are dispiriting times for political progressives in North America, but on much of Horses in the Sky, Efrim Menuck and his ragtag troupe of patriots sound uncommonly pissy and defeated. The fourth album created under the various Mt. Zion banners, Horses finds the group expanding upon their established crescendo-laden orchestral formulae in a heady, almost reckless fashion, as though they're determined to rally themselves from sociopolitical despondency through sheer force of musical will.

As with Mt. Zion's 2003 release Thee Rusted Satellites Gather + Sing, this album is weighted heavily with Menuck's quavering, strident vocals; a fact some listeners might reasonably regard as an obstacle. Thankfully, however, his bandmates frequently come to his aid both instrumentally and vocally, with some of these tracks eventually morphing into genuine old-fashioned polyphonic Sunday-school rounds. (In fact, one could probably make the argument that Efrim is perhaps this outfit's least naturally gifted vocalist.)

Though the group's song lengths remain epic, most of the tracks here are forged as multi-beaded chains, with each divided episodically into shorter, distinctive fragments. This approach pays immediate dividends on "God Bless Our Dead Marines", which opens the album with Efrim forlornly singing, "We put angels in the electric chair" over a slow, folkish pulse. Soon, however, the full collective kicks into a frenzied, Eastern European-flavored gypsy stomp which sounds like it could be an outtake from Tom Waits' The Black Rider, the group's string section playing as true fiddlers rather than violinists for perhaps the first time in memory.

The track continues with Efrim angrily cursing "vulgar kings on their dirty thrones" before segueing into a new, resolute piano-led melody and then to a heartbreakingly lovely coda, which eventually swells to include the whole ensemble singing, "When the world is sick/ Can no one be well/ But I dreamt we were all beautiful and strong." As powerful as this conclusion is, however, its effect seems to be that of whistling past the graveyard, particularly as the album journeys on through its catalog of grim societal realities.

The instrumentation is pared down to a solitary acoustic guitar on the album's title-track, a straightforward, Phil Ochs-like protest song ("Our schools look like prisons/ And our prisons look like malls") while "Hang On To Each Other" features the audible crackle of a roaring campfire, while Efrim and all sing "Hang on to each other and every fucking thing you love" with a desperate urgency, as though never expecting to see each other again once the embers burn away.

Despite the strengths of these tracks, in other spots the album's lyrics devolve out of sheer ineffectual frustration, as on the extended anti-government rant "Teddy Roosevelt's Guns". With its annoyingly repetitive chorus "O Canada, I've never been your son," the group provides a litany of complaints which grows increasingly tiresome as it turns to such silly taunts as "your senators are in diapers or stinking of gin." (Although maybe I'm just getting overly defensive since I've been known to enjoy the occasional bottle of gin myself.)

"Ring Them Bells (Freedom Has Come and Gone)" brings Horses in the Sky to a close with what is the album's most familiar-sounding orchestral slow-build, and though perhaps by now such maneuvers should seem rote for anyone in the extended GYBE family, the track is a reminder of how effective this method can still be when executed with such fervent emotion and exacting precision, with the music's soaring uplift able to briefly assuage the listener's fears of the grim future continually depicted in the group's lyrics.