Godspeed You Black Emperor: Lift
Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven!
(Kranky 043 two CD set. ???, prod.; Daryl (?),
eng. DDD (?). TT: 90:14)
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 If I leave some blanks
on the production credits of this disc, it's because the band is deliberately vague about
them, as well as other matters, such as their line-up. Daryl is credited in the liner
notes as "pushing play & record at chemical sound." The band is listed as:
Sophie, Norsola, David, Thierry, Sidan, Maurc, Bruce, Roger and Efrim. And don't expect a
lot more information from the band's website either.
Yet there's a buzz about Godspeed You Black Emperor,
despite the fact that you're not likely to hear them on tightly programmed mainstream
radio. Maybe on your local indie-lovin' college station, though. I first heard of them
when I copy-edited an audiophile magazine's website, which asked correspondents to list
their three favorite recordings of 2000. Only two artists were mentioned three times:
Madonna and G.Y.B.E. Hmm, I thought . . .
Then I got last week's New Yorker, which essentially
said: See this Toronto collective now, so you can say you saw them when. Hmm . . .
Godspeed You Black Emperor is a rock band. They play music
with glockenspiels and horns and fiddles and tape loops and long, long drones, but it all
comes down ultimately to drums and guitars. It's ambient music for people who'd rather
hear the Ramones than silence.
Yet, they aren't just a rock band. They combine
found "soundscapes" and interviews into the mix. The track that starts this
two-CD set is pure 60Hz hum -- I turned off my hi-fi, convinced I'd blown a tube, and went
to play it in my home theater rig. I pressed play and heard 60Hz hum. And they have the
courage to really stretch things out -- that hum went on for what seemed a long time
before gradually transforming itself into music that was part chime, part bagpipe.
Their music's constantly changing nature makes it hard to
write about. It sounds like one thing for a while, then it sounds nothing like that.
Feedback predominates for a while, slowly mutating into the wash of white noise you get
from a soft mallet drum roll on a huge gong. There are formal sections that sound like
baroque music or folksong and there are loping rockers that are straight from the garage.
The song "Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to
Heaven," after that 60-cycle intro, drifts into a repeating rhythmic melodic pattern
that starts out simple but gets more and more complex as it roars to a shattering
crescendo before resolving into a calming drone that wanders into a scathing guitar solo
which in turn becomes a joyful march that ultimately self-destructs and is followed by a
recording of a warning message repeating in a parking lot at LAX. Along the way, the song
changes identity, becoming "Gathering Storm" about five minutes in, and
switching over to (morphing into?) "Il pleut à mourir (+ clatters like
worry)." (Hey, I'm doing the best I can at deciphering the handwritten titles -- it's
almost like the band doesn't want you to know stuff like song titles or what instruments
they play.)
Along the way the group plays with dynamics and contrast,
alternating densely textured passages with droning chimes and wind-like ambient passages.
It's hard to describe, but absolutely compelling and as hypnotic as all get out.
Any description shortchanges the music, as words inevitably
must do. Mendelssohn said "People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, that
it leaves them in such doubt as to what they are supposed to think, whereas words can be
understood by everyone. But to me it seems exactly the opposite." I reckon that about
covers it -- the music of Godspeed You Black Emperor is definitely about something,
it's just not about something specific. It's about moods and dreams, and in its drift from
tune-module to tune-module, it evokes dream logic with its dramatic and illogical jumpcuts
and strange-but-inevitable destinations.
For me, it works. I suspect that this success owes an awful
lot to the way the brain functions -- it wants to make sense from the data it
receives. Perhaps this music is like playing a CD while watching a movie picked at random
-- it appears to possess amazing synchronicities, but maybe that's just my synapses firing
in random sequence. If so, I say good for them! People think nothing of using stairmasters
for hours on end, let's hear it for jumping to conclusions!
I have no way of knowing if Godspeed You Black Emperor is
the next big thing. But I understand why everyone I know who has heard the band has become
a convert. This is great stuff -- music that takes a chance, music that repays the
listener's effort tenfold.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
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