Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Yanqui U.X.O.
[Constellation; 2002]
Rating: 5.6
You know what I miss? I miss political rock music. Probably it's out there and I'm looking in all the
wrong places. But I know this: indie rock, always one of the great dissenting voices of American underground
media, has gone virtually silent. In the 1980s, this music was rife with anti-government sentiment, from
Black Flag to The Minutemen to Gang of Four to the Dead Kennedys to Elvis Costello. But with the ushering
in of ambivalent slacker-rock, political messages became passe and we grew steadily more tolerant of
Washington's silent plots. Conspiracy theories soon became kitsch, and now, in the aftermath of "X-Files"
geekdom and September 11th pacifism, there are few better ways to get hipster eyes rolling than by
questioning authority. What perfect timing: We've lethargically accepted that Washington is brutally
malevolent just as our most wicked administration yet has come to power.
Yay, the most political rock band going right now is Canadian! Thanks, America. Granted, their message
is pretty ham-fisted, what with those didactic, overbearing manifestos and ominous woodcuts of skull-faced
forefathers chopping off peoples' hands. But Godspeed is at least putting forth some kind of an effort,
which is more than can be said for most. I mean, I dig a lot of music, and songs about our girlfriends and
our scenes and hating our parents are fine-- sometimes great, even transcendent. But when that's all there
is, we have a problem.
So, upfront, that's why I respect Godspeed You Black Emperor. I just wish their approach was more effective.
For one, they're an instrumental band whose political message is carried out through vague and overwrought
packaging which merely hints at a greater "something". And their latest offering, Yanqui U.X.O., is
vague as ever. We're told that "09-15-00", one of the album's song titles, "is ariel sharon surrounded by
1,000 israeli soldiers marching on al-haram ash-sharif& provoking another intifada". How? The music is
simple atmospheric orchestration with no agenda of its own, and as easily reflects a DMV waitroom as
Palestinian uprising. And on the back of the sleeve, we're treated to a six-degrees-of-bomb-makers, where
Tomahawk cruise missile manufacturers Raytheon Industries are traced, through a twisted labyrinth of
corporations (including DirecTV!), to the recording industry's major labels. Briefly: just because you
have a friend who knows an auto mechanic who worked on a car owned by a guy who was the gaffer on the set
of She's Having a Baby does not mean you know Kevin Bacon.
Unfortunately, Yanqui's tenebrous finger-pointing isn't its only shortcoming. The band has taken its
naysayers' gripes to heart and done away with those moody vocal snippets that not only hinted at a deeper
protest, but also jolted you awake just as your mind began to wander. And where the hell is the undercurrent?
The two discs of 2000's Lift Your Skinny Fists used Godspeed's sweeping, emotional übersuites as a
basic centerpiece to the bizarre ambient textures and noise projects which backed them. Meanwhile,
Yanqui U.X.O. strips the group to their essentials which, as it just so happens, are not quite
essential enough. Ideas are scarce, too-- where Skinny Fists would erupt without warning into a
sac-scorching Satriani solo ("Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-Way"), the tracks on Yanqui are content
to continue building to bored, satiated endings we can see coming 20 minutes in advance. Couldn't we have
some venting? Are we frustrated or just dramatic?
Worse: the record is consumed by a painfully glacial pace. Each song plods endlessly onward toward an
inevitable conclusion with no revelation in store for the poor listener, who can only endure these
disc-filling five tracks in the hopes that, maybe, just maybe, that one glorious moment will arrive and
redeem the interminable wait with a display of power so towering and majestic that it in itself will be a
$12 experience. Sorry, it doesn't. Once, at the end of "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls," the band comes
close with a triumphant burst of cinematic melody and Efrim's wailing screwdriver'd guitar. The quarter-hour
denouement that precedes it is a long road to travel, though, and with this record's production difficulties,
you're slogging through the mud every step of the way.
See, the importance of good production on a record like this cannot be exaggerated, and I place much of the
blame for this record's failure to impact on Steve Albini's shoulders. Last year, he turned Mogwai's similarly
minded My Father, My King into a raging, five-headed superbeast with precision micing and mixing that
brought the music's strongest elements to the fore, resulting in a speaker-rattling detonation of pristine
strength. Yanqui is no recreation, or even approximation, of that tunneling force. Here, perhaps
because of the number of instruments at hand, or maybe because of the insane over-reverbing, all of the
instruments (save the ever-present martial drums) blend together into a kind of muddy concordance, often
making distinguishing the guitars from the violins an impossibility.
What we're left with, then, is the skeleton of an incredibly original band whose once-driving conviction and
determination has been sapped by sluggishness and a lack of invention. It doesn't help them that they've
spawned countless imitators and saturated the market with uniform side projects. Or that their radical
politics, which could be such a defining attribute, are relegated to cardboard inserts. Or that they just
keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, hoping for a different result. Someone
tell Godspeed that orchestras play all kinds of music and that uprising can take other forms in
music than apexes conveying abandonment, loss or apocalypse. Revolt, as I see it, is a beautiful thing,
but not this beautiful.
-Ryan Schreiber, October 28th, 2002