Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Anarchy in power

It's not easy to find a definition for Godspeed You Black Emperor!, even though their inclination to go against every logic currently present in the music scene is obvious. The certain facts about this band, made up of as many as nine musicians, are their Canadian origin, Montreal to be precise, and their instrumental approach — though even on this front there's something peculiar: there's no singing on their records, yet voices are present, fleeting, almost as if inserted at random, often spoken with a characteristic coldness and darkness. Tracks frequently exceed fifteen minutes, with epic passages spilling into furious digressions reminiscent of Mogwai, but also of a "classical roughness" dear to Dirty Three. For these reasons Godspeed You Black Emperor! are often lumped into the post-rock category, but perhaps the term progressive (think of King Crimson, for example) would better describe their sonic choices. These are just opinions, of course; the reality is that the Canadian band couldn't care less about all the attempts critics have made to pigeonhole them into some genre: "We don't feel part of any musical community, not even an instrumental one," says bassist Mauro Pezzente. "In fact, we find it worrying that quite a few bands can sound similar to us. It's symptomatic of the fact that there isn't a real movement of progression, of change."

Formed in 1994, the band debuted that same year with a limited-edition cassette, All Lights Fucked On The Holy Amp Drooling, but their first true album came out in 1997, the splendid F#A#Infinity, initially released on vinyl by the small Canadian label Constellation, before reaching a wider audience via Kranky in 1998. The band's peculiarity is immediately apparent: there are only three tracks, all extremely long, starting with the fifteen minutes of "The Dead Flag Blues," where one can note similarities with Mark Nelson's Labradford. But it's the second piece, the mesmerizing "East Hastings," that delivers seventeen minutes of pure emotion, opening with the sound of traffic noise (Montreal's, perhaps?) before alternating between gentle moments and others building to a violent crescendo. The track that closes the debut album is "Providence": half an hour of musical madness, devoid, at least on the surface, of any logical sense. The orchestral dimension (more than one critic has even cited Morricone as an influence) often dominates, but the way it alternates with raw, electronically treated noise is brilliant, even if not an easy listen.

1999 saw the release of the EP "Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada," again on Kranky, with which the band fully lived up to the expectations created by their debut album. The EP runs twenty-eight minutes in total and consists of just two titles: "Moya," a track that starts slowly, with strings painting ethereal frescoes before surging into an impetuous crescendo, and "Blaise Bailey Finnegan III," a seventeen-minute track that, after a "spoken" opening, explodes into a wild instrumental frenzy of guitars, violins and strings. And it's precisely these sonorities that serve as the means through which Godspeed You Black Emperor! try to communicate with their now-numerous fans, as Pezzente explains: "I think we try to convey something propulsive to the audience, even if we don't always manage to do a great job of it. We try to focus on reflection, on the impressions that can strike people when they hear us play: the risk of remaining vague, indeterminate, is strong. It's very positive to encourage people to think, to form their own opinions."

2000 brought Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!, a double CD made up of four tracks divided into sections (to figure out how each piece is split into various parts, you need to read a block diagram included with the album) that continues down the path of orchestral rock — though perhaps "cinematic music" would be a more fitting term, given how, in many passages of this album, it feels more like listening to a film score than a rock record. Yet the use of strings and violins doesn't push the purely rock digressions into the background, as in the "Monheim" section of "Sleep," which help make the album intriguing and dense with fascination. Bleak atmospheres, scratched by dark, decidedly claustrophobic rhythms, characterize this distinctly melancholic work, even if perhaps less gothic than its predecessors. An "anarchic" work, far from any canonical form of sonority, which confirms the band's undisputed worth, but also the difficulty this kind of music has in reaching large audiences. But that doesn't seem to be much of a problem for Godspeed You! Black Emperor, at least according to Pezzente: "We're not that interested in how many people show up at our concerts. Lately, since we've become a bit more popular and well-known, a problem is that those who come to see us are increasingly less interested in the concerts themselves. They follow us only because we've gotten media attention, because of the 'external' weight placed on the band, and unfortunately I no longer find any kind of contact or connection with a lot of people. We would probably stop playing if we felt completely disconnected from the audience watching us."

Godspeed You! Black Emperor (not a typo — they've now moved the exclamation mark to the second word) return in 2002 with Yanqui U.X.O., an enigmatic title that roughly translates to "American Unexploded Ordnance." The atmospheres are darker, but their compositions traverse, as usual, a heavily stretched-out folk-blues, cosmic rock, Morricone and psychedelia. Of all the tracks, the most self-referential is the second, "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls," which begins with the band's usual guitar riff around which the other instruments revolve, until the music grows more menacing with drums and horns building a pre-battle atmosphere, leading to the predictable final explosion. The other two tracks, both suites, are more appealing, where the band crafts atmospheres often built on an apocalyptic folk-blues (not Death in June-style, but in mood...) as in the opening "09-15-00" (the start date of the second Intifada), where the instruments paint a desolate, fragmented picture, and the track's development lends greater force to the music's evocative power, especially in the other closing suite, "Motherfucker=Redeemer," where the music seems to shatter, evoking post-war scenarios. It's the album's most striking moment, preceding the powerful final section — perhaps the most "rock" piece the Canadian collective has ever produced, driving and cathartic.

Shortly after that record came the announcement of an indefinite hiatus in the collective's activity; a hiatus that, despite numerous side projects and collaborations by its musicians, would last for almost a decade.

First a return to the stage, with a world tour between late 2010 and early 2011, then finally a new studio album, which, not without some surprise, saw the light of day in late 2012.

The two long tracks and two shorter interludes of 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! are not actually entirely "new" compositions, but rather reworkings of material already performed live since as far back as 2003. That alone isn't enough to dismiss it as a "dated" work, yet it's quite clear that since then the Godspeed You! Black Emperor formula hasn't substantially evolved, except in terms of an even more claustrophobic and granite-like impact in the massive guitar parts, which reveal even more clearly their progressive lineage — a lineage by virtue of which the impact is delivered through driving, insistent progressions rather than feedback torsions.

Perhaps also due to the reduced string section, which suffers from the defection of cellist Norsola Johnson, ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! is dominated by the more nervous character of compositions that once balanced romanticism with dramatic catharsis.

Regardless of any judgment on its overall meaning, the album fails in its mission of emotional sweep as much as it succeeds in sketching new landscapes of unease, with an ascetic approach that is less engaging than in the past.

Only three years pass before Godspeed You! Black Emperor return to record a new chapter: after three double albums, ‘Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress‘ is condensed into just forty minutes on a single LP, with four tracks forming one unbroken flow, partly reworking a piece already known to fans of the band in its live incarnation titled “Behemoth”. The real novelty lies in the total absence of spoken word and field recordings, letting the more melodic elements of their music flow freely.

The decade-long void that GY!BE had left between their masterpiece Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven! and ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! underscored an emotional stasis, one that seemed to lose its innovative edge in favour of an almost progressive-rock descriptiveness that now gains another classic-rock nuance, namely Black Sabbath, who hover over the riff-invasion of “Peasantry Or ‘Light! Inside Of Light!’”: post-rock in doom catharsis, with drum rolls and strings as sharp as metal marching toward light digressions and developments with an unusual harmonic pathos.

The dissonances are gentler than in the past and seemingly more reassuring, as in “Asunder, Sweet”, which stays poised between melancholy and depression until drones and corroded violins inject a faint timbral unease that flows into the long, epic finale of “Piss Crowns Are Trebled”, the track closest to the band’s previous work.

The narrative tone of ‘Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress’ is more personal and less collective, as if marking a new political and social awareness within the group: analysis and commentary give way to a lofty, meditative contemplation, which finds in “Lambs’ Breath” a new starting point for a more solemn and less contrived sonic synthesis. Many of the underground nuances have also vanished, and anguish has been replaced by scepticism. Everything on the record is sharper in focus and less pretentious than before, and that’s the best news for fans of the Canadian band.

Luciferian Towers imagines a world where the symbols of modern capitalism are destroyed. It’s as if the Canadians had found a symbolic target to attack. The great towers, the glass, steel and concrete buildings, the secret dwellings of the bosses who create “alienating labour”, exporters of wars for profit, creators of endless consumerist needs that, like new “golden calves”, are worshipped by masses willing to make any sacrifice to obtain the longed-for prosperity.

Tearing down the Luciferian towers (“Undoing A Luciferian Towers”) becomes the path to a new catharsis, a liberation from the chains. The long notes of trumpets and bagpipes, the repetitive rhythms and the cinematic grandeur set the pace for almost eight minutes of melancholy and desolation; the optimism of the title seems, in fact, only symbolic. The towers of steel, glass and concrete will one day be destroyed by fire and flame, the wind will whistle through hundreds of shattered windows. The final anthem of the closing minutes seems almost to celebrate this event, as liberating as it is distant in time. Divided into three parts, “Bosses Hang” is an imposing post-rock symphony that uses obsessive repetition to induce hypnosis, building steadily to create identification and catharsis. Between maximalist walls of sound (“Fam/Famine”) and anthems for the Non-State (“Hantem For No State”), the journey moves through a perpetually downcast mood, dotted with melancholic strings (“Pt. I”), desert-rock guitars in the style of Calexico (“Pt. II”), and above all an epic finale (“Pt. III”) that evokes Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks played by a post-rock orchestra. Distortions, drones and noise merge with solemn melodies that let joy and despair, apocalypse and rebirth, coexist.

Long at the forefront of the fight against corporatism and against the identity thus far defined as the State, Godspeed You! Black Emperor craft the first complete, and perhaps definitive, work of the post-pandemic era – assuming we’re even on the right path to face it – a powerful cry against the inefficiency of governments, and thus aimed at all international powers: G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! (2021). A full 27 years after the band’s formation, the original core – Efrim Menuck (guitar), Mike Moya (guitar) and Mauro Pezzente (bass) – seems to have lost none of the drive that gave rise to GY!BE; even the vinyl layout has a reason behind it, with the 10″ holding the two shorter tracks and the main 12″ containing the two longer, conceptually central compositions.

Caps lock and imperative titles underline the militant, restless tone of the most painful chapter in the Canadian band’s history, which moves with sure footing between post-rock remnants, drone music, minimalism, chamber music and psychedelia – a cerebral, psychotic blend, yet less redundant and even melancholically sentimental, as the music unfolds according to hidden rules while remaining constantly wrapped in apparent chaos.

Hums, voices, radio signals and sonic shards open the first of the two long suites that form the backbone of “G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!”, more than twenty minutes recounting the decline of a global, interconnected civilisation, a refrain that, like a mantra, evokes one last cry of suffering before the apocalypse. “A Military Alphabet (Five Eyes All Blind) (4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz)/ Job’s Lament/ First Of The Last Glaciers/ Where We Break How We Shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY)”, already known from live shows as “Glacier”, brings back together the full power of the band’s sonic layering, amid hypnotic harmonic scales, fragmented riffs, volcanic sonic progressions unfurling into beds of feedback, dissonance and pulsing rhythms – never so forceful and crisp – that turn into a modern psychedelic jig in the vein of Glenn Branca/Neu!, before giving way to an intense, piercing tenderness that dissolves just before a few gunshots silence even the birdsong.

For “‘GOVERNMENT CAME’ (9980.0kHz 3617.1kHz 4521.0 kHz)/ Cliffs Gaze/ cliffs’ gaze at empty waters’ rise/ ASHES TO SEA or NEARER TO THEE” too – known live and in bootlegs as “Cliff” – the band comes close to the twenty-minute mark, in one of the most elegiac and harmonically powerful pieces of their career, where post-rock textures melt into white-hot riffs that in turn weave into one of the most cinematic and majestic scores in the Canadian band’s catalogue, a jet of lava that then falls back into silence amid noise residue, electronic sounds and violin screeches with spectral, anxiety-inducing timbres, which open empty spaces that guitar and glockenspiel fill with a few crystalline notes, ready to warm the harmonic front before it is enriched with new, urgent melodic phrases and narrative emphasis.

The two shorter compositions sustain the record’s melodically intense and melancholic descriptive tone; the slow-burning refrain of “Fire At Static Valley” is also one of its most incisive moments, a mix of noise and languor, reeking of panic and despair, a breathtaking, extemporaneous post-symphony. More biting and solemn, on the other hand, is the closing flow of “OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN (For D.H.)”, a quivering, typically post-rock minimalism that rides one of the band’s most gripping examples of drone music, where dawn and dusk, death and resurrection, power and anarchy blur together – the final anathema of a band that, like few others, has captured the spirit of our time, a group of true visionaries of the age of chaos and future points of reference for anyone seeking to understand the events of this new millennium.

As always, G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! is also a project that cannot be separated from the filmic component accompanying the Canadian band’s live shows; the ever-brilliant filmmaker Karl Lemieux has spared no effort in creating one of their most powerful visual accompaniments, fully capturing the expressive dystonia poised between apocalypse and hope.

It was a significant choice to share, just days after the album’s release, the entire visual component of the project: the screening in the empty hall and the images unfolding alongside the tracks not only add depth to GY!BE’s dramatic sonic liturgy, but also make the project’s raison d’être even more vivid – having translated into music and images the chilling monotony and cyclical nature of death, the ritual to which we are all both invited and condemned, waiting for a cough to rouse our dormant consciences, before the end of the world, or rather, of the State.

The Canadian band's next album begins from 13 February 2024, the day the official death toll in Gaza stood at 28,340. Godspeed You! Black Emperor have always been close to the Palestinian cause, ever since Yanqui U.X.O. (2002), whose liner notes stated "Ariel Sharon, surrounded by 1,000 soldiers, walks on the Temple Mount (Al-Aqsa), thus provoking another Intifada" — and now they have only one way left to voice their dissent: composing, once more, a symphony of grief, in a cruel and hopeless world.

No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead (2024) is the most powerful title any album could aspire to this year. After celebrating the dream of the collapse of American imperialism and corporate lobbies on albums like Luciferian Towers and G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!!, the Montreal outfit raises its voice over the tragedy of the heavy civilian losses in Gaza, unfolding under the dazed gaze of a sham democracy.

There's no doubt that the dark reverb and guitar textures of "Sun Is A Hole Sun Is A Vapor" revisit already-familiar sonic tropes, but amid the faint murmurs at the start, where voices mimic the sound of gunfire (bang bang) as if it were just a children's game, a sun-drenched melody creeps in that could easily pass for a potential patriotic anthem.

This semi-virtual phase is followed by a first decisive step towards reality: "Babys In A Thundercloud" is a long exploration of the band's many sonic trademarks, with guitars evoking harsh desert landscapes and dark passages soon countered by an almost playful, building rhythm. What at first seems like the group's classic made-in-GY!BE fabric gradually takes on dramatic, elegiac tones; the violin ignites its more rock-driven nature before becoming co-protagonist alongside a guitar with western-style sonorities that blend with the earlier desert atmospheres, while scorching, epic guitar notes warm the tones back up, delivering one of the most evocative and powerful riffs the band has ever put together.

But the soul of the project lies in the long "Raindrops Castle In Lead", an alternation of disembodied drone music, furious guitars and moments of calm reminiscent of a post-war lull; as the violin sketches out some of the band's sweetest melodies, a final roar sets the stage for the stark antithesis of "Broken Spires At Dead Capital" — just as in the bitter reality of war-torn lands, there's little room for hope here: menacing, dark electronic sounds and strings that shed tears instead of notes slowly erode everything, giving way to the cynicism of "Pale Spectator Takes Photographs", where the sense of solitude and isolation becomes even more distressing.

At this point, even the sequence of track titles takes on an increasingly important role: in "Grey Rubble — Green Shoots", tragedy and romanticism almost intertwine, once again disorienting the listener, who is left with a strong impression that the Canadian band's sound has softened — and it's here, in this hall-of-mirrors game, that it's worth asking a question: have we really grown so used to such rage and grief that we've come to accept it, unable to move beyond a numb, apathetic compassion?

Contributions by Paolo Sforza ("Yanqui U.X.O."), Raffaello Russo ("'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("'Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress'", "G_d's Pee AT STATE'S END!", "No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead"), Valerio D'Onofrio ("Luciferian Towers", No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead),

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