Godspeed You Black Emperor!
Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven
[Kranky]
Rating: 9.0
Jeremiah is Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s prophet. The Hebrew
emblazoned in dirty copper on the cover of their
Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP belongs to him:
tohu-va-bohu, it reads: void and waste. The lengthy passage
on the sleeve of that EP is lifted from his book. Blase
Bailey Finnegan III, the Providence street preacher whose
rantings appear on the two first Godspeed You Black Emperor!
releases, is his avatar. The music of Godspeed, for all its
bombast and lament, extends Jeremiah's ministry into a new
millennium.
Preaching in a
vocabulary drawn from Boston hardcore, Puritan jeremiad,
Henryk Gorecki, Glenn Branca, early Sonic Youth, documentary
filmmaking, Candian radio drama, and a spidery array of radical
leftist rhetoric, Godspeed You Black Emperor! have delivered a
blistering (albeit politically imprecise) homily on the new
world order. Incidentally, it was also Jeremiah who predicted
that great destruction would come from the North.
That having been said, the Canadian nontet's Lift Your Skinny
Fists like Antennas to Heaven is a massive, achingly beautiful
work, alternately elegiac and ferocious. However, Lift
plays like an oddly transitional album: much of the first disc
presents a refinement of the sound that crystallized on the
Slow Riot EP, while the second disc flirts with moments
of vertiginous shoegazing, looser rock drumming and reckless
crescendos of unalloyed noise. Succinctly, the first disc is
easily continuous with their earlier work; the second disc might
just be the future. The disparity is immediately striking.
This is not to suggest that the first disc is not wonderful-- it
is, but mostly as a cultivation of ideas and sounds embedded in
F#A#oo or Slow Riot. The waltz-like grace of the
opening part of "Storm" (titled "Levez Vos Skinny Fists Comme
Antennas to Heaven") is dominated by rising cello and violin,
evolving, with the addition of guitars and martial drum taps,
into a loud triumphal procession. Blaring trumpets seem to
announce the advent of some head of state, and the whole affair
proceeds with military discipline and measured effect. The violent
explosion never comes: the parade merely approaches and recedes.
The second part, "Gathering Storm," begins in entwined guitars:
one bowed, one screwdrivered, one gently plucked. With the
entrance of the cello, violin and rumbling toms, the guitars
begin to shriek in distortion. The effect is amped-up slowcore
sludge that is all tension and no release, merely dissipation
and noise reminiscent of Cale-era Velvet Underground performances.
"Cancer Towers on the Holy Road Hi-Way" is locomotive percussion
thundering toward breakdown.
The second track, "Static," opens with a looping supermarket
welcome message fused into thick, distorted cackling and
indecipherable megaphone vitriol. Sparse piano and drone
frames the static-drenched field recordings with mournful
effect. "Chart #3" is treated guitar drone and distant buzzing
similar to records released by the Fatalists or James Plotkin.
Piercing static and high frequency ambient yields to the
monologue of a fringe Christian preacher. "When you see the
face of God," he intones, "you will die and there will be
nothing left of you, except the god-man, the god-woman, the
heavenly man, the heavenly women..." His sincerity, girded
by skeletal string arrangements, is devastating.
The penultimate part of the first disc, "World Police and
Friendly Fires," initially reminds me of Erik Frielander's
Watchman compositions, as well as his work with Greg
Feldman on John Zorn's Bar Kokhba. Eventually, however,
"World Police" erupts into thick, layered drone rock (think
the Dirty Three, but less dispersed) that sounds like a heavy
metal riff slowed down to a quarter speed and suddenly
accelerated into wailing guitars and slashing strings. It is,
I think, the first disc's finest moment. The final part, "The
Buildings They are Sleeping Now" is a quiet whoosh of
fragmentary strings and deep noise. The disc simply falls
apart; the last moments are so inaudible that you're never
sure when the music has actually stopped.
Murray Ostril introduces the second disc with his reminiscing
on the heyday of Coney Island. The sentiment is so politically
and religiously neutral that it stands apart from other Godspeed
field recordings: nostalgia for the good old days. Nothing more.
The second part of "Sleep," "Monhein," is dominated by Efrim
Menuck's wailing screwdriver-on-frets effect. From this plodding
dirge comes an incredible air raid siren of sound, flagging and
rising over the military percussion. But instead of the familiar
tension and release, Godspeed opts for maddening sustain. When
the drums die out, all that remains is the tremulous scream.
After a Labradford-like introduction of repetitive guitar and
subtle chimes, "Broken Windows, Locks of Love Part III" erupts
into sheets of noise somewhere between Loveless and
Pangea. The advent of nimble, almost hip-hop drumming,
is a shock, and a loose, raucous jam coalesces, reminiscent of Cul
de Sac's country-surf-kraut concoctions. Part of you will say:
why can't it all be like this?
The final track, "Antennas to Heaven," begins with an old mountain
folk tune, inevitably consumed in processed machine noise. "Edgy
Swingset Acid" is all echoey chimes and glockenspiel in loops
while Francophone children dreamily play and sing. The playground,
however, is weirdly menaced by liturgical organs that soon give
way to a momentary burst of dense, jangly rock. On "She Dreamt She
Was a Bulldozer She Dreamt She Was Alone in an Empty Field," guitars
and bells tick-tock over delicate dark ambient, counting the
moments as the instruments flare up on fire and descend like a
sunset. Godspeed You Black Emperor! have apparently expanded their
emotional repertoire of indignation and grief to include joy.
The appropriately titled "Deathkamp Drone," however, is ghostly
electronic gloom. The track's final moments are a wash of humming
synths, reverberating guitars, and pins-and-needles noise that comes
too goddamn close to human screaming. By the time the piece
ends, the tide is way out.
Real innovation in a leaderless nontet must be geologically slow.
Lift Your Skinny Fists succeeds, I think, precisely because
it utilizes Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s numbers in a way that
previous works did not. Lift opens up its sound to various
voices and influences within the collective, letting moments of
pop/rock, ambient and even hip-hop blossom where once there was only
gravelly symphonics and miles and miles of aural landscape. Those
moments were, for me, nothing short of thrilling. This is why
Lift should not be accused of merely preaching to the
converted fan who has long since accepted the grandiosity of their
sound and the vague rhetoric of their dissent. They show signs of
doing what they condemn the world for not doing: changing, evolving,
experimenting with new approaches, growing. And that's why Godspeed
You Black Emperor!, along with Jeremiah, Blaise Finnegan and every
other prophet of doom might all turn out to be wrong. Perhaps it
does get better before its gets worse.
-Brent S. Sirota