Godspeed You! Black Emperor, "Lift Your Skinny Fists"
The box office for Stubb's is operated by Front Gate Tickets (and since they're not Ticketmaster I feel okay linking to them), who has a promotion going with the online music site eMusic. I got a promo card in the mail that offered 50 free downloads from eMusic, and while I'm not certain that's actually an exclusive with Front Gate, I figured I'd try it out anyhow.
One of the albums I purchased proved to be quite the costly maneuver for eMusic. Their subscription plans allow you a quota of song downloads a month, which is why the "gift card" promotion makes sense--it's a taste of how you operate their particular scheme. Well, after hunting around through their plethora of indie and lesser-known artists, I came across a group I had long heard of but never listened to.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor is perhaps most closely associated with Mogwai, their Scottish spiritual brethren; but where Mogwai's instrumental post-rock mirrors the personal apocalypses of the British lower working class, the music of GY!BE speaks to something a bit more North American in its paranoia and darkness.
Both bands are equally capable of trudging through the horrors of a lonely, empty existence. Mogwai uses that nihilism to fuel its own aggressive rage, its tearing guitars and its screaming pools of feedback. Mogwai makes music that seems inextricably tied to its homeland, the violence and the agony of the Irish outbursts, the claustrophobic, industrial feelings of a dirty mill town.
The album I purchased is called Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, a title I alluded to in a poem of my own, written a few years ago. The image that evocative name conjures for me is that of Job, kneeling on the broken ground among his ruined moments, railing at the God who has abandoned him. The first track is "Gathering Storm," and for the first three-quarters it is nearly triumphant, almost Sigur Ros-inspired in its sweeping sublimity. As the final crescendo whistles out into a crying guitar's squeal, it becomes eminently clear that the ascendancy is short-lived. What follows is a melancholy, guarded, schizophrenic album, incorporating found sounds ("Terrible Canyons of Static" includes the nightmarish fever-dream of a street preacher, almost Gnostic in his assertions of special knowledge), the wails of violins, and a haunting emptiness in its soundscape that speaks to primal fear.
I described Mogwai's atmospherics, and how they display a purely British melancholy; it is no surprise that the same empire that produced the rage and the fury of the Sex Pistols could create a band of disenchanted men writing songs like "Moses? I Amn't." But GY!BE's milieu is much more sinister, inspired equally by the Cold War as any musical movement. The hollow minimalism and the shifting, minor-key explorations would not be out of place in the soundtrack of 28 Days Later or 12 Monkeys, films of the aftermath of humanity's self-destruction.
GY!BE hails from Canada, but their music and its fears of military-industrial dominance, of empty cities and wasted landscapes, of surveillance and totalitarianism, is just as poignant and frighteningly moving today as it would have been had it been released in the 1960s. Not a casual listen by any means, but this stunning work is highly recommended.