GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR

A lot of imitators have come and gone in those ten years, and the style of music they championed has long been codified (I almost wrote 'embalmed'). But now the dormant Godspeed has awakened, and reclaimed its spot at the top of the Post Rock pyramid.

What's immediately apparent in the new album is a resurgence of energy, with an emphasis on heavier rock dynamics. In classic fashion the album presents a pair of typically epic 20- minute workouts, alternating with two brief soundscapes adrift in dark ambient waters. The format hasn't changed dramatically, including the inscrutable cover art and track titles (I'm willing to bet something named "Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable" would only make sense to a native Québcéois). But in no way does the new CD simply regurgitate past glories.

Expect some inspired, otherworldly drones and dynamic neo-Krautrock grooves, oppressive and uplifting at the same time. The escalating motorik rhythms and walls of noise in "Mladic" (named after the Serbian war criminal?) and "We Drift Like Worried Fire" are spellbinding, the former standing out as possibly the single most awesome piece of music ever penned by this very loud outfit. And the weird burst of what sounds like an army of crazed Tibetan lamas having a percussion fest at the end of the track offers further evidence of the band's willingness to sack and pillage new musical worlds.

The album works best when placed in the context of the band's entire recorded career, in chronological order. Heard that way, "'Allelujah!" is not only a thrilling comeback, but a decisive late-inning victory: a masterpiece patiently waiting to be acknowledged as such. 4.99 stars, anyone?

Like any evolutionary step forward the change was almost infinitesimal but very real, signaled by the artful relocating of the exclamation mark in the ensemble's already odd moniker. It's true the new album was more overtly political, at least in its artwork and title. But the music itself, being entirely instrumental, maintained a fidelity to art over propaganda, despite contentious track titles like the two-part "Motherf*cker=Redeemer" (of course it would have been even more provocative the other way around).

The band didn't tinker much with their neo-classical instrumentation and arrangements, often presented with an avant-garde lassitude ideal for anyone who thought the music of kindred spirits SIGUR RÓS too bouncy and bright. The Godspeed crowd was also renowned for not using keyboards in their mini-symphonies, but is that a mellotron I hear early in "09-15-00", or just the treated sound of a violin or viola?

More attention was devoted to structure and internal flow: note the lack of enigmatic sub-sections. Having fewer transitions between interior movements allowed the players to stretch their music to the breaking point, as heard in the slow heat-death of "Rockets Fall On Rocket Falls". Just when it seems like the tempo is succumbing to the second law of thermodynamics it begins powering up, slowly gaining strength and momentum like a vast, unstoppable glacier (before global warming), at one point suddenly swapping its relentless 4/4 rhythm for an even more urgent 3/4 time.

There seems to have been a deliberate attempt to dial back the uncanny power of earlier efforts. As loud as it often is, the music here leans more toward minimalism, favoring monochromatic repetition instead of Technicolor drama. Maybe the title U.X.O (Unexploded Ordinance) was something more than just an offhand slap at the global military-industrial complex: this is the sound of a highly explosive ensemble, but without the expected detonation.

Or maybe what we're hearing are the smoldering ashes left behind by the auto-da-fé of "Lift Your Skinny Fists..." Either way the results won't have the same immediate impact as the previous album, but given time and patience it may yet prove to be their most accomplished statement.

But it's the rising crescendo afterward that never fails to send a shiver of ecstasy down my aging spine. And the rest of the album, spread out over two discs, follows a similar formula with the same effect. The key to the music is in its arrangement: the repetition of slow instrumental build-up, attenuated climax, and lingering coda, with quieter melancholy passages juxtaposed against moments of truly euphoric bedlam.

Other reviewers here have capably dissected each lengthy cut, sometimes inspired to colorful flights of rhetoric (see AtomicCrimsonRush's omnibus compilation), so I won't step on their toes with my own gushing prose. But take a moment to consider the larger structure of the whole album, in which each track functions like a separate movement in a single 90-minute symphony. The music itself is hardly difficult or challenging, but the entirety demands a lot of patience: this is not an album designed for casual listening.

I recommend ignoring the whimsical sub-titles (possibly included for maximum publishing royalties), in order to better hear each 20-minute opus as a complete experience. Unlike the band's more loosely assembled debut album, the discreet interior sections were pieced together in a more holistic manner better suited to the GY!BE brand of large scale composition.

With an open mind and a patient pair of ears this ambitious double-disc will stand revealed as an epic achievement, and a landmark recording of its kind. Add one more voice to the near-unanimous chorus of praise surrounding it.

The world-weary introductory narration to "The Dead Flag Blues", the opening elegy off the debut Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, sets a haunting mood that would forever define the musical career of these Canadian Post Rock pioneers. But more than that, it also describes the experience of listening to the album itself, which for a newcomer can feel like a headlong plunge into a bottomless pool of terror and bliss.

Despite all the maudlin strings and atmospheric guitars, that first epic medley is nowhere near as gloomy as its apocalyptic monologue would suggest. In fact after the rumbling freight train sound effect it turns almost jaunty, in a turn-of-the-last century sort of way. But what was it that Freud said about trains and death? The symbolism should be obvious, even to listeners who don't remember the similar metaphor used by VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR in "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers", almost three decades earlier.

The eighteen-minute instrumental tension and release of "East Hastings" could have been designed as a blueprint for Post Rock structural dynamics. And when the nearly half-hour long "Providence" rolls slowly over the horizon (beginning with more rumors of Armageddon) the harder rock elements are finally pushed to center stage, in a tense, escalating jam that almost singlehandedly justifies the band's place on a web site devoted to Progressive Rock.

Of course even then GY!BE was more of an open-door orchestral collective than a legitimate rock group, and their first album needs to be absorbed by some form of sonic osmosis rather than listened to in a traditional manner. The music is often too loud for ambient navel-gazing, too slow for short attention spans, and arranged in piecemeal fragments, not always integrated successfully but helping the album achieve its uneasy, fractured power. Even the mini-masterpiece of "Providence" doesn't quite reach the dramatic resolution it promises, breaking into a sort of Post Rock bolero instead.

Maybe the young ensemble didn't believe there would ever be a second album, so they forced all their scattershot ideas onto a single disc. But the breadth of music is never less than impressive, and the impact of this freshman effort is undeniable. What it ultimately foretold was not the end of the world, but the start of an enigmatic, influential career.

(This must be one of my poorest "reviews" ever... But maybe this little piece of poorly expressed information - that I didn't like this album - adds one dimension to the overall reception.)

Godspeed You Black Emperor's debut full length establishes the traits of the band of subject as well as a bite of the sound of post-rock in general. My understanding of this album is that F#A# (infinity) was meant to challenge the listener's perception of music, make them think, and/or engulf them in a certain atmosphere. There's no time to fiddle with riffs in the traditional rock sense, no over-the-top goofiness, not even many words to follow along with. The whole point of F#A# (infinity) appears to put the listener in a mood.

It's almost as if the album is meant to be understood subconsciously, so those with a more ''normal'' approach to understanding prog rock will have anger bouts trying to determine just what the heck is going on. The music has more in common with classical music or film scores, but the electric guitar plays quite the prominent role in shaping the themes, so it's fair to assume this has ''rock'' connotations.

The mood GY!BE put the listener in is quite bleak and depressing. Listening to ''Dead Flag Blues'' after the poetry at the beginning (which by itself sounds rather dull) gives a surprisingly distant yet warm tone that cannot be fully transposed into words. Then there are those ecstasy moments, usually augmented by the drum tempo, where the band go into full Magma mode where the brain tunes out the world around so that there's nothing left but the intensity and mesmerisation of the music in your headphones. Look at the middle of ''East Hastings'' or the 7/8 section of ''Providence'' to hear where I'm going with this.

All that said, there are simply too many nitpicks. Many times there will be some dead space in between themes. It's good to have the listener breathe, but there's only so much quiet tension one can take before boredom sets in. The worst is towards the end of ''Providence'' which does the irritating 90's trick of going into a few minutes of silence before pulling back into the music.

If you've ever heard of an album being more of an experience, this is one of those albums. Get this to hear how the granddaddies of post-rock got the ball rolling.

"Mladic" is the 20 minute opener that most rave about, and for good reason. It opens with samples of what sounds like a rescue operation then the atmosphere and violin takes over. There's this hum i'll call it that starts to take over. Drums build before 5 1/2 minutes, in fact the whole overall sound is now building after 6 minutes. There's what sounds to me like an Eastern vibe before 9 minues. It even reminds me of THE TEA PARTY. This stops around 11 minutes as distorted guitar leads while the drums pound. It starts to wind down around 13 minutes but it does pick back up. "Their Helicopters' Sing" is a slow moving atmospheric piece that sort of drones throughout. Not a big fan of this one really.

"We Drift Like Worried Fire" is the other 20 minutes piece. It builds from a very quiet beginning. It's haunting around 2 minutes. That changes after 3 minutes as the guitar is picked then it builds to an intense sound before 9 minutes. A calm with violin takes over 10 1/2 minutes in then it slowly starts to build again but this isn't as good as earlier. Another calm comes in with violin then it builds to an intense conclusion. "Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable" like the other 6 1/2 minute track sort of drones throughout with atmosphere.

Well in my opinion this doesn't measure up to any of their three previous studio albums or the EP "Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada" but it's still pretty good. Not 4 stars good but a good comeback for these talented musicians from Quebec. And I have to mention that it was cool to hear them name dropped in that "Pineapple Express" movie.

Aside from some loudhailer noises at the start the album once again eschews the sort of found audio snippets which jazzed up earlier Godspeed works, focusing instead on the instrumental performances much as Yanqui U.X.O. did, but a production which steps away from the sometimes sterile textures of Yanqui makes it sound more like a continuation of the classic Godspeed aesthetic of Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada or Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. At the same time, unusually harsh riffing towards the beginning of Mladic finds the band exploring textures and approaches which are new to Godspeed's work, so the band has far from stood still over the last decade. If we're only to get one Godspeed album per decade, I'm fine with it so long as the albums are as good as this one.

Needless to say that GYBE's return was going to be a difficult one if they'd not moved on somewhat from a nowadays typical post-rock sound, one that is so passé, cliché and to be honest now totally redundant. To say that this album brings a whole facet to the genre and/or moves it forward even an inch would be an outright lie. It's quite the opposite actually, because there isn't much new under the sun, and this new album doesn't sound much different to their previous one. It's certainly sonically a tad different, because the production (was there any at all?) is somehow completely botched: it sounds like a mess someone would've recorded on a micro-cassette recorder from the crowd in a concert taking place in poor-soundproofed storage building. What's to say abiout the music itself , if only that it contains four lengthy dronal tracks, most likely spread over to vinyl discs but gathered on one CD. The usually slow never-ending crescendos and the equally long descendos are still there, but this time providing a sludgy and muddy wall of sound (much more so than theur first four releases), where it's difficult to tell who's doing what

Not sure these guys should've come back after such a long hiatus. They had left the scene as one of the artistic leaders (despite not being big sellers), but ten years later they literally come back to the race a with laps behind the EitS or Mogwaï, etc.. Does it matter to the listener and do the musos actually care about this?? Difficult to say from a formation that has never privileged normal communication, as the usual obscure cardboard sleeve is still as obscure and obtuse in terms of basic liner sleeve infos. Some things never change, but I'm not sure that in this case it's a positive thing. Definitely a let down for this writer, but I'm sure GYBE couldn't care less. Not bad per se, but hardly essential.

On this latest album "Allelujah! Don't Bend! Descend!" immediately the atmosphere is brooding and ominous, beginning with one long drone that quietly resonates and gradually builds to a very powerful rhythmic cadence. I love how this sounds like a nocturnal scene with frogs on a pond and crickets chirping, made possible with guitar squeals and a reverberating violin. It conjures on the mind a scene of alienation in a vast wilderness. The darkness falls over gradually and the music grows to a blinding intensity. A fast percussion rhythm breaks through and a grandiose melody that thunders out. A rainstorm comes down and a hypnotic drone pierces the ears until the note descends mercifully and releases the tension. As the notes descend it is as though the dawn is breaking through to a new day. At the end clanking percussion and tribal sounds are heard. A masterful opening track clocking just under 20 minutes. I have no idea what 'Mladic' means but it is as incredible as anything I have heard from these talented musicians.

'Their Helicopters' Sing' is next with a more sensible running time of 6:30. This one sizzles in the intro like a swarm of locusts and a very gloomy drone rumbles with portentous force. Again, there is a build up of sonic resonance sliding into a kind of dreamy ambience. There is no signature, just a gradual drone, with some atmospheric strings and percussive clunks. This sounds like the soundtrack to a nightmare with someone creeping up behind, and it really gave me the creeps. The violin serrations are chilling over the low rumbling drone. One to listen to in the dark on a cold wintery night with the shutters drawn.

'We Drift Like Worried Fire' is another epic clocking 20:07, and again it is a gradual build up of sound. A strong drum beat locks in as a guitar riff hypnotically drives it. The violins are beautiful and this is perhaps not as dark as previous material. The music is very organic, seamlessly flowing lucidly, and there is a dreaminess to the music that is poetic and yet powerful. The guitar is well executed especially with those high trilling sustained notes. It is perhaps some of the best guitar work I have heard from Efrim Manuel Menueck and David Bryant, especially the closing section which begins with very melancholy tones. The violin of Sophie Trudeau and drum coda from Aidan Girt and Bruce Cawdron is grandiose and quite stirring the way it builds into a war like march. The tempo quickens after about 16 minutes, with tons of basslines from Mauro Pezzente, and Thierry Amar. The spacey textures that chime in at 17 and a half minutes are really beautiful, even reminding me of Hawkwind at this stage. This may be my favourite track from GY!BE. It is simply a masterpiece of atmospheric music, emotionally stirring and flowing into one idea after another; simply mesmirising.

The album closes with 'Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable', a 6:31 track with a non-sensible title akin to a lot of other GY!BE tracks. It opens with a glowing ambience of pulsating whines, sounding like some cosmic sonic feedback. This reverberates and grows in volume with powerful vibrations. It grows intensely loud and even painful and then cuts out to a low whine mercifully. The ghostly howls drift along on a wave of ambient noise, sounding like Tangerine Dream, until it finally fades and the album comes to a close.

Overall this is another atmospheric album from the masters of ominous music, "Allelujah! Don't Bend! Descend!" is everything you would expect from them; atmospheric gloom, ominous drones, building up experimental washes of low rumbles and piercing whines, and music to conjure up bleak imagery. It may not be as rewarding as "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven", "Yanqui U.X.O." or "f#a#infinity", especially as there are no narratives which I always liked to augment the atmospheres, however it is still a compelling album and tends to haunt the listener, requiring many listens to finally captivate. Again 'We Drift Like Worried Fire' is one reason to wrap your ears around this but it tends to grow on you as a whole album just like the previous releases. I believe fans of the band will not be disappointed, but this is slightly more rhythmic than previous efforts. It will be interesting to see how people react to this latest album as it is as striking musically as any other GY!BE album, and it is refreshing that the band have maintained their signature sound and yet continue to reinvent themselves with experimentation and that avant garde approach to music as an art form.