(2012) Godspeed You! Black Emperor - 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!’
Review:
Around the turn of the millennium, Godspeed You! Black Emperor were the right band at the right time. They arrived with their debut album, F#A#∞, in 1997, when the speed of technology was accelerating, genres were being shuffled, and people were thinking about where music might go. Godspeed, a loose and mysterious collective from Canada (guitarist Efrim Menuck seemed like the leader, but they preferred to be received as a unit) with an anarchist political bent who fused Ennio Morricone, minimalism, found sound, and metal-inflected noise, presented one intriguing possibility.
The group stayed busy during its initial run-- by 2002, when they released Yanqui U.X.O., they had put out three expansive full-lengths and a long EP-- and then they put Godspeed on the shelf and went away for a while. If they'd never gotten back together and had never released another note of music, it wouldn't have mattered. Their legacy was secure. But Godspeed started playing live again in 2010 and, just as it was when they first came on the scene, they filled a hole in music that we either didn't know existed or had forgotten about. Then, two weeks ago, came the surprise announcement of a new album, Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!, their first in exactly 10 years. Once again, their timing is impeccable. If Godspeed around the turn of the millennium felt like a band of the moment, now, in a time of rapid cultural turnover and bite-sized music consumption, they feel out of step in a very necessary way.
It's tempting to look at Allelujah! through the lens of politics, especially since Godspeed themselves have so often encouraged this viewpoint. When we last heard from them on record, it was a year after 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan was well underway, and the war in Iraq was just around the corner. We were settling into a decade that was, from an American perspective, defined by two wars started by an increasingly unpopular president and an inflating economic bubble that would pop just as he was leaving office. Their music and presentation drew some of its energy from this anxiety. So listening to new music from Godspeed now-- during an election season, when the wars and the aftermath of that economy are still being argued every day by two presidential candidates grappling with the legacy of the early 2000s-- you can't help but allow the political moment to shape how it's heard.
But the focus on the band's politics obscures something important: Godspeed You! Black Emperor are making art, not writing editorials. And the fact that they are making art gives them leeway to do things that wouldn't work in the context of pure rhetoric. It allows them to find magnificence in destruction and build an aesthetic out of decay and loss. So for all their political slogans, pointed titles, and references to global doom, engagement with Godspeed's music can feel exceedingly personal. When listening to their music, I'm not necessarily thinking about the downtrodden transcending their place in the capitalist hierarchy or the end of the world; I'm thinking about the idea of transcendence, the raw grace of noise, and the tragedy of endings. Godspeed's music works so brilliantly because it can be abstracted and scaled, blown up into an edifice that towers over a continent or shrunk down to something that feels at home in a bedroom. So mapping the contours of their grand music onto your own ordinary life can feel both natural and inspiring.
The two lengthy tracks on Allelujah!, "Mladic" and "We Drift Like Worried Fire", have been part of the band's live repertoire since 2003. So the record feels in one sense like Godspeed taking care of unfinished business, presenting existing music from their influential run in a context that showcases its full force and power. Taken together, those tracks serve as a 40-minute summary of everything that made this band great. "Mladic" is all gloom and menace, building from an opening vocal snippet, adding pings of guitar, strings that saw away in a Middle Eastern mode, and dark clouds of feedback. This is the Godspeed that learned so much from the pummeling repetition of Swans and the fiendish drama of metal. There's not exactly hope in a track like "Mladic", but there is a kind of darkly shaded catharsis. Godspeed have never sounded quite this heavy, and it's especially impressive in how far it can veer from the themes that hold it together without losing the thread.
"We Drift Like Worried Fire" is the flip-side of "Mladic", both literally and figuratively. For all their grim black-and-white roadside imagery and scenes of destruction, it can be easy to overlook just how joyful Godspeed's music can be. Built around a simple guitar motif consisting of just a few notes, "Worried Fire" is one of those accruing pieces that gathers one element after another for 10 minutes until it's so gorgeous you almost can't take it. And at exactly that moment, Godspeed pause and then push the music over the top with an explosion of guitar that snaps everything that came before into focus. "Worried Fire" is music that makes you forget about politics and the machinations of the record business and the bullshit of internet chatter and brings you into singularity with the sheer beauty of their sound, music to make you cry with a smile on your face. When it's playing, the rest of the world goes away for 20 minutes.
"Worried Fire" is also the kind of song that Godspeed's early peers (Mogwai, Dirty Three) as well as the bands that followed (Explosions in the Sky, Mono) write with some regularity, but they never quite hit these heights. Godspeed have always been about more than volume, more than just addition and subtraction. And if Yanqui found them getting a little too close to their descendants, Allelujah! makes clear that Godspeed will always own this sound. Few can match their feel for arrangement or sense of structure. And the two shorter tracks on this album, "Their Helicopters' Sing" and "Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable", are evidence of their infallible ear for texture. They're both rich, dense drones, "Helicopter" an especially thick mix of feedback and accordion while "Strung Like Lights" is airier and more unstable, not unlike the locked groove that came at the second side of their debut F#A#∞.
In one of the many inserts that came with the vinyl version of that debut, there's a diagram that takes the form of an architectural blueprint. It's called "Faulty Schematics of Ruined Machine [to Scale]" and it contains a drawing with four axes marked as Fear, Hope, Desire, and Regret and text describing elements of the diagram in cryptic and desperate language. One paragraph highlights a drawing of a tape loop connected between a distant satellite and a broken tape machine, a loop "so long it was rocketed thru atmosphere by wigged-out Soviet Cosmonaut... it will take three lifetimes to hear in its entirety." Godspeed use tape loops, both live and on record, and the key visual element of their shows involves the projection of 16mm film loops by collective member Karl Lemieux. For this band, there's always been something appealing about repeating cycles and rituals-- sounds and images that vanish over the horizon and then come back around again, like the trains that roll by their practice space at Hotel 2 Tango. Planets orbit, people are born and die, and music has a moment and then vanishes before returning again. And so it goes with Allelujah!, an album of music that is both new and old from a band that we thought we might never hear from again, one we should appreciate while we can.
Tracklist:
01 - Mladic.flac
02 - Their Helicopters' Sing.flac
03 - We Drift Like Worried Fire.flac
04 - Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable.flac
Summary:
Country: USA
Genre: post-rock
Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~ 2600-2900 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
