Bracing beauty on solo album by Godspeed’s Menuck
Godspeed co-founder Menuck’s second solo album sparked by an odd romance
I don’t know Efrim Manuel Menuck well enough to say that he’s full of surprises, but I can safely say the starting point for his new solo album, Pissing Stars, comes out of left field.
As a co-founder of Montreal’s mythically, mystically, underground and world-renowned post-rock collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Menuck is anti-establishment as a matter of duty.
When his band’s 2012 release ’Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! won the Polaris Music Prize for best Canadian album, not only did he and his bandmates not show up to claim the award, they issued a statement pointing out the contradictions of prizes, galas and having a car company as a sponsor while the ice caps are melting. Then they gave the $30,000 prize to a program that provides musical instruments to prisoners in Quebec.
All of which brings us to Mary Hart. More specifically, the shortlived romance between the longtime co-host of Entertainment Tonight and Mohamed Khashoggi — son of Saudi oil billionaire Adnan Khashoggi — which somehow burrowed its way into teenage punk Menuck’s consciousness and stuck around nearly 30 years to inspire his second solo album. He’s as mystified as you are.
“I still don’t really know (why it intrigued me),” he said Tuesday morning, after closing the curtains to block the sunlight as we sat in the Mile Ex indie venue Bar Le Ritz PDB, which he co-owns.
“I read about (Hart and Khashoggi) when I was super young, 18 or 19, at a point in my life when I was definitely on a lot of drugs, which might have something to do with it. It got into my head like a worm, as some sort of archetype, both romantic and revolting.
“I often refer back to it. … There’s something weirdly fascinating about that intersection. It’s amazing that it even happened. It’s a crazy thing, and it speaks to a lot of bigger issues. It sounds like a punchline to some highbrow socio-political joke.”
Menuck’s interest in the tabloid romance came from a more personal place, as an unlikely yet effective way to explore the ups and downs of relationships. You see, he had stuff to say and, more used to the shadows and the safety of making music within a democratic ensemble that eschews mainstream music industry tropes, he wasn’t exactly comfortable with standing centre stage and singing his heart out.
“My intent was to make a narrative record about love that wasn’t written from a personal viewpoint, but was sort of generalized,” he said. “I didn’t really succeed. I ended up with an album written from a personal viewpoint but filtered through this different narrative.”
Listening to the album, Hart and Khashoggi don’t exactly monopolize your attention. The four-minute instrumental Hart_Khashoggi arrives halfway through, riding cascading waves of drones, static and synthesizers, achieving an effect at once soothing and disconcerting.
“I’ve always liked distortion,” Menuck said. “As a guitar player, my happiest moments are those where you feel like you’re engaging with electricity. That’s why they call it electric guitar.”
Pissing Stars plays out like a collection of post-apocalyptic hymns — Menuck prefers the word “chants.”
In the opening track Black Flags Ov Thee Holy Sonne, he plaintively sings: “Everything in pieces on the floor / Good times aren’t the good times anymore / The king is a child, the weather is wild, we’re all broke as s--t and drowning.”
Later, on LxOxVx / Shelter in Place, he warbles over a dangerous-sounding electronic tone: “I’ve loved, and been loved, and I’ve been held / Pinned to the sheets by a man with a belt / Swung from his hand and downwards.”
On other songs, such as the industrial rhythm-propelled The State and Its Love and Genocide, or the weightless lament, The Beauty of Children and the War Against the Poor, the titles speak for themselves. This may be Menuck’s love album, but politics are never far from his mind. In the current climate, how could they be? That said, there’s a bracing beauty to much of Pissing Stars. Menuck isn’t averse to the observation.
“The idea of confrontational gestures is something you have to be really thoughtful about,” he said. “Especially coming from a place where, with Godspeed or (sister band Thee Silver Mt.) Zion or solo, you’re already beginning with what, for a lot of people, feels like a confrontational gesture. So I think it’s important to be gentle.”
For an artist who has always stood defiantly on the fringe, both musically and politically, there is a certain irony to becoming part of the rampant resistance against U.S. President Donald Trump, whose own pop culture-abetted identity fits into the overarching concept of unexpected juxtaposition unifying Menuck’s album.
“It’s such a weird time,” Menuck said. “I’ve never lived in a historical moment where so many people agree things are broken and need to change.”
But contrary to what one might think, politics have always come second for Menuck.
“Nothing I’ve ever been involved in has come out of the gate like, ‘This is going to be a political album.’ Politics came naturally. It’s the same for this one. But weirdly, even though the (creative) process started before the last presidential campaign, I think it does sort of refer to it, accidentally.
“It’s sort of a post-Trump reality we’re living in, which is a heavy kind of blues that needs to be acknowledged.”