The Breakdown
Let’s start with some facts. Godspeed You! Black Emperor are a seminal alt rock, orchestral collective formed 1994 in Montreal. People who write about contemporary music see their early noughties trilogy (F♯ A♯ ∞, Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven and Yanqui U.X.O.) as definitive long form, instrumental statements. If you are reading this ‘review’, you’ve probably, like this ‘reviewer’, listened to these records many times. They are ageless albums, as impactful as the first time you curled in a ball and gave in to them, able still to unsettle and question, anger and uplift…but that’s drifting away from the factual.
In 2002 Godspeed You! Black Emperor took a breather before returning to live performance in 2010 and recording in 2013. Albums have appeared regularly since then, reinforcing the group’s reputation for creating symphonic, electric rock soundscapes which attack this world’s power-brokers’ for their vicious inhumanity. Now we have their eighth studio album, which is, as with all their other work, delivered through Constellation. It’s called ‘NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD’, an inscription which states the numbers murdered in the Gaza Strip horror zone at a particular point in time, a fact which rips at the heart of this cathartic recording.
But with ‘NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD’ GY!BE seem to look beyond solely reflecting the depths of this tragedy or reframing it as a symbol of the human world’s implosion. The album feels in many ways openly personal, a companion or maybe extension to co-founder Efrim Manuck’s recent release with WE ARE WINTERS BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN (Reviewed HERE ). Questions around individual conscience and integrity stalk this new Godspeed undertaking, emotional stresses which the group describe as: ‘we drifted through it, arguing/ every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom/ we sat down together and wrote it in one room/ and then sat down in a different room, recording’. The vacuous reality of their making music in these times, ‘the sun setting above beds of ash while we sat together, arguing’ is echoed in the album’s front cover. Pictured here the studio room is empty, devoid of instruments, chairs discarded, cups overturned and cardboard gaffa-taped over the windows. You wonder if the musicians are behind the screening, hiding, detached, feeling lost?
It’s from such a broader context of tensely strung dilemmas that ‘NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD’ has emerged, visceral, immediate and spontaneous. These six powerful tunes come across as a band confronting their contradictions, a stepping out to shape music honestly in response, at times mournful, at others incongruously elevating, provoking sorrow but also resiliently hopeful. A recording that’s strikes you as aware of its own actual significance.
The understated SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPOURS introduces the album, a whirring calm suddenly lit by an anthemic electric guitar, carving a melody line which flowers naturally. The feel is loose and fresh, skittering free-jazz percussion and Thierry Amar’s contrebasse elasticity simmering the atmosphere. You’re left wondering what this sunrise will bring and BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD maintains that suspense. Amidst the rotating distant sirens and storm cracks, a homely twanged guitar calls then duets alongside a lightly brushed rhythmic swing. Soon the fanfare swells, guitars squealing Mogwai-esque, Sophie Trudeau’s violin gliding before a sombre pause, like a memory from an old gramophone. That the song gathers momentum again, grander, almost marching to a close, confounds expectations as you wonder at this sonic triumph…or maybe that ambiguity is the point.
What can be said is that throughout ‘NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD’ David Bryant, Efrim Manuck and Michael Moya’s guitars are central to the music’s framework. On this album there are fewer passages where a string section brings an acoustic fragility but what maybe reduced in terms of contrast is gained in immediacy and improvisational thrill. Take the pivotal RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD where, after the tingling ambience, the Godspeed percussive gearing soon locks into those crucial chiming raw guitars. There is a still, where Michele Fiedler Fuentes’ illusive spoken word and Trudeau’s warm fiddle lines gather breath, before the collective gather up into a barely controlled, cataclysmic Velvets’ growl. It’s desperately brilliant.
Such an outpouring rises again on the multi- dimensional PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS. Here the song hovers over darker truths, beginning with a violin weeping prologue then tumbling into the doomed thud of tom toms and monotone guitar stabs. Finally, without warning the piece erupts, crunched dynamics, urgent bell ringing and a spiralling descent to soft strums, accordion sighs and a broken guitar melody. A track which at times recalls the abrasive impact of the Albini produced Yanqui U.X.O., it reverberates from a new time and with a more weathered perspective.
For an album riddled with tension and self-questioning ‘NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD’ closes not with dreamy resolution but with a statement of resilience. GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS is a succinct (by GY!BE standards), unself-conscious slice of big music, peeling guitar cascades, dramatic violin flourishes and flaying drum splashes, all urging onwards before resting. In the scaling down, the melodic hug of violin and guitar ease closer to the end note, weary but together.
Right now and beyond, ‘NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD’ feels like an important record, not least because it’s title exposes a naked reminder of the scale of the catastrophe when the recording was named and how, unchecked, it deepens daily. That’s undoubtedly of foundational and intended significance, but Godspeed You! Black Emperor have also provided a soundtrack for personal reflection on the issues, the ingrained injustices and our own contradictions. Was it Tolstoy who said ‘art is a means of communicating emotion, with the aim of promoting mutual understanding’? This is an album that for some, hopefully many, will enable just that.
Get your copy of “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor from your local record store or direct from Constellation HERE
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