Godspeed You! Black Emperor
“No Title As of 13 February 2024, 28,340 Dead”
CONSTELLATION
ABOVE THE CURRENT
You cannot bury your head in the sand. That’s what the new album from post-rock pioneers Godspeed You! Black Emperor tells you from the start. Despite the music they’ve made since forming 30 years ago being mostly instrumental, the Canadian outfit has always been inherently political. And not just mildly political, but extremely so—vocally and violently anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-war, and even anti-music industry. The cover of 2002’s Yanqui U.X.O., for example, is a still from a video of US bombs being dropped, while its back cover is a diagram showing the many ties between the then-dominant major-label record companies and the military-industrial complex. The liner notes of the record describe its opening song as “ariel sharon surrounded by 1000 israeli soldiers marching on al-haram ash-sharif & provoking another intifada,” the lowercase type standing in stark contrast to the heaviness of its meaning.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the title of this ninth full-length is a reference to the death toll in Gaza at the titular date as the result of Israel’s US-funded retribution-turned-genocide campaign. Even if you wanted to avoid politics by listening to this album of dramatic and portentous instrumental music, the title prevents you from doing so. You cannot bury your head in the sand—because of the 28,340 bodies buried in it, a number that has since risen to over 40,000. Unsurprisingly, the whole album sounds like a requiem to the world as it is today, albeit one permeated by rays of occasional light. Opener “Sun Is a Hole Is Vapors” is glorious and almost optimistic, half-militaristic in its repeating refrain while also recalling Jimi Hendrix’s fuck-you to the US national anthem at Woodstock. “Babys in a Thundercloud” sounds at first like the smell of death and then the response to it—grief, disbelief, and anger wrapped into one slow, unholy explosion of noise—while “Raindrops Cast in Lead” lilts and marches, soars and crashes, blossoms and mourns all at the same time, lifetimes ending and starting within its 13 beautiful, haunting minutes.
“Broken Spires at Dead Kapital” is the shortest song here at just three and a half minutes, but the heaviness of its string-laden sorrow is inescapable, especially as it descends and blends toward the end into the darkness of “Pale Spectator Takes Photographs.” It’s a song thoroughly devoid of hope, its guitars buzzing like flies around a pile of corpses—in this way it almost feels like a wordless reinterpretation of County Joe and the Fish’s “An Untitled Protest.” Despite the lack of lyrics, it’s just as visceral, just as powerful, just as bleak, just as horrifying, just as hopeless. And then there’s final track “Grey Rubble - Green Shoots,” which captures the two extremes of its title, destruction and rebirth, in a swoop of majestic orchestration that’s full of pain and terror—but also, as the song quiets down toward its end, hope. Not, of course, for those whose lives have been obliterated by this and all the other conflicts waged by America, but for the future, for humanity, for an escape from the hell that humans have made for ourselves.
