Godspeed You! Black Emperor

“The flow is constant. Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, particles, waves, specks of dust. Only catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. […] Every disaster makes us wish for a bigger one, something truly devastating.”

(Don DeLillo)

With their strong symbolic charge, moments of temporal transition have always exerted a sinister fascination on humankind, stirring hopes, fears and premonitions of disaster — or simply of change — that in fact never materialized on those given dates. The turn into the year 2000 was thus inevitably freighted with meaning, caught between millenarian prophecies, impending catastrophes, visions of futuristic worlds and the thoroughly modern fear of the millennium "bug" — even though, mathematically speaking, the new millennium wouldn't actually begin until the following year.

Musical imagination, naturally inclined to channel the most spontaneous impulses of the human spirit, could hardly escape expectations of a break from the "rock" conventions that had held sway for over half a century, let alone more or less apocalyptic readings of such a symbolic turning point in time. But since, whatever many would have us believe, Lavoisier's famous postulate — nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed — applies to music too, the end of rock's "short century" is marked, at least in part, by reworkings of its original fabric steeped in progressive and orchestral elements, which at the same time absorb the deconstructions and noise-driven emphasis developed over a good couple of decades of post-punk. What was actually changing in those years (and perhaps irreversibly) was the way music was consumed and the very method of its creation: on one hand, the definitive fading of a collective dimension, the fragmentation of "movements", the increasing difficulty of applying neat, unifying readings; on the other, a drift toward creative isolationism, toward basement or bedroom do it yourself, made easier by the ever-wider spread of digital technology and access to record production.

Running counter to such a picture, the existence of an open collective of artists who, sharing places and times, gave rise to a compact and steadily expanding musical universe — dotted with more or less lasting projects, improvisational experiments and even forays into galaxies far removed from its pulsing core — cannot help but evoke the mythologized days of old rock. Its fullest collective expression is summed up by the curious name-cum-motto Godspeed You Black Emperor!, borrowed from an obscure 1976 Japanese documentary.

Active in Montreal's underground scene since the first half of the '90s, the shifting collective of more than a dozen artists, formed around guitarists Efrim Menuck and Mike Moya and bassist Mauro Pezzente, had already delivered a masterpiece back in 1997 with their official debut album "F#A#∞": three long compositions born from an explosive mix of dirty sonics, vocal and noise samples, interstellar drift, Labradford-esque abstractions and, above all, a complex, cinematic orchestral architecture designed to heighten a dynamic emotional dimension made of suspended time and peaks of cathartic release.

Following up a debut like that — and the subsequent, magnificent "Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada" EP — was thus an extremely tall order. Perhaps that's also why the québécois band decided to transcend the album format altogether and erect a veritable monolith lasting nearly ninety minutes, split into four long movements, which sharpens the dramatic character of the debut, condensing it into long progressions and slow-motion explosions with tremendous emotional pull.

White Noise

The story begins on the afternoon of May 14, 2000, in an anonymous convenience store at Los Angeles International Airport — or at least, an announcement broadcast over a loudspeaker in that non-place is the first anthropic trace (in fact, just a human voice) encountered along the ouverture of the work, "Storm", a movement that immediately charges forward, introducing a long, essentially aphasic narration, yet dense with unsettling suggestions. In the rare interviews given over the course of the band's activity, Efrim and co. have always blurred the political and social outlines of the messages contained in their music, as well as in the writings and images accompanying it, and yet there can be little doubt in regarding "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!" as a merciless look at a humanity in decline. It thus seems a symbolic choice to interpolate a fragment of anonymous post-modern daily life into the surging progression of guitars and dry rhythms, grafted onto a fundamentally symphonic musical conception, unfolded in imposing harmonic constructions that nevertheless remain, to a large extent, tightly controlled.

Across the four movements, in fact, the collective is more concerned with outlining emotional structures than with deconstructing sound. While there's no shortage of significant surges in tempo and distortion-heavy emphasis (particularly in the claustrophobic rooms of "Gathering Storm" and "World Police And Friendly Fire"), rather than erupting into outright explosions, the compositional segments unfold through successive, interconnected junctures. Even where the storm follows the calm without mediation (as in the jolt that shakes "She Dreamt She Was A Bulldozer, She Dreamt She Was Alone In An Empty Field", within the closing movement), the abruptness of the shift never hardens into the kind of blunt cuts that would soon become a mannerism elsewhere, but instead preserves a developmental coherence akin to an organic discourse, conceived and carried out with extraordinary cohesion among its various parts.

Underworld

But the essence of such a complex work certainly cannot be confined to its "vertical" dynamics alone, nor to its fullest, most forcefully impactful moments — which inevitably draw the most attention. And that's not only because of the ample space given over to field recordings, chamber piéces and sound fragments of various kinds and origins, but above all because such elements play a role that is anything but marginal in the overall economy of the work.

It's a submerged world, frozen into snapshots yet at the same time teeming with life, that frames the monumental crescendos and openings, occasionally breaking the surface — at first in tentative "sound slides", and then, as the work progresses, in more extended long takes and segments carrying some degree of narrative content. The latter is the case with the brief vocal passage that opens the third movement, "Sleep", which describes a Coney Island that now survives only in memory — a seal on the precariousness of human affairs to which the various samples drawn from religious sermons, railway noises, children's nursery rhymes and even a lo-fi recording of Moya's clumsy country jam are all structurally devoted.

Alongside these not strictly musical elements, the intricate "undergrowth" of rhythmic progressions and guitar torsions is filled out by a rich bouquet of chamber-music nuances and moments of substantial ambient stasis. On the former front, the underlying romanticism of the strings, which always maintain a symmetrical dialogue with the guitars, alternates with cameos of varying duration, marked by cadenced piano echoes — closely related to the parallel venture of the concurrent Silver Mt. Zion project — as well as singular incursions such as the gothic-tinged violin insert within the second movement, or the touches of glockenspiel and shrill dissonance that, in the two closing parts of the record, give voice to mournful spectral murmurs.

Though more limited in scope, the abstract interludes are not mere breathing spaces between the surging passages; rather, they prove entirely functional to building tension that is later released elsewhere in the work, or to sustaining its persistence, as with the sinister ambient inertia that opens and closes "Static", and the tremulous post-atomic frequencies of "Antennas To Heaven"'s "Deathkamp Drone".  

The Falling Man

The relentless interplay of interlocking parts, connections and overlaps between the record's two "souls", along with the sheer plurality of solutions found on "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!", gives the work an extraordinary narrative coherence, one in which ambient narcolepsy and rhythmic metronomics, chamber-music elegance and electric impetus coexist as inseparable elements of a grandiose fresco of strength and fragility, of torment and hope.

Despite the apocalyptic aura and the dark oppression conveyed also by the macabre artwork by William J. Schaff Jr. (who has also worked with, among others, Songs: Ohia and Okkervil River), the empathic message of this ideal documentary of the falling/fallen world envisioned by the Québécois collective does not fully extinguish at least the mirage of a comeback, nor does it imply surrender in the face of the enormity of a human disaster that is both present and imminent. Thus, if the incredible tension built by "World Police And Friendly Fire" opens up a thunderous abyss of obsessive, incessant rhythms, the harmonic circularity of "Antennas To Heaven" transforms the disjointed convulsions of an irreparable fall into the positive breath of catharsis, in a kind of elegy with hands and hearts turned towards an infinity that the final, figurative cry seeks to evoke.

But it's the second disc, almost in its entirety, that opens up a faint celestial light against the more violent oppression of the album's first half; while the closing movement turns out to be the most "ambient" and abstract of the whole work, the preceding "Sleep" is the most fluid and dense with overwhelming suggestions, like a pyre slowly blazing up from unprecedented, hazy cadences before rising through gradual shifts in tempo, until finally finding purifying resolution in potentially endless, romantic loops.

And it is precisely in the transition between "Monheim" and "Broken Windows, Lock Of Love Pt. III", even more than anywhere else in their brief discography, that Godspeed You Black Emperor! reach an expressive peak that not only stands as essential testimony to musical post-modernity around the turn of the millennium, but would also rise, not without some formalistic misreading, to become the template for what would be simplistically summed up as a "genre" — soon claimed by note-perfect imitators of the most varied backgrounds, from prog nostalgists to reformed metalheads.

The truth is that, with two monuments such as "F#A#∞" and "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!", the Montreal collective achieved an artistic sublimation capable not only of diverting the flow of "rock" at the turn of the millennium with its epic scope, but of doing so through paths entirely different from that self-serving urge to impress which would soon become the stylistic hallmark of so many supposed phenomena of innovation, ready to be swept away amid general indifference.

It would be all too easy to fuel a myth through grandiloquent definitions or absolutist claims; the enormous merit of Godspeed You Black Emperor! is not that of having been the first, but perhaps "merely" that of having rejected any intellectualist pretense through a spontaneity wholly akin to the (post-)punk spirit, thus offering, in an unrepeatable cornucopia of emotions, the all-encompassing sensory experience of a rock band playing alongside a chamber orchestra. An experience that, through "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!", any music lover interested in understanding the present day should have at least once in their life.

An immense, overwhelming, fun-da-men-tal work.

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17/01/2011