Hi, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, "NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD".
Here we have what I believe is the eighth album from instrumental and experimental rock legends, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. With multiple classics under their belt at this point, the band helped define the style of post-rock in a profound way. While many bands may have proliferated during the genre's commercial peak in the 2000s, there are truly few groups in my eyes that are actually comparable artistically to Godspeed.
They have been and continue to be in a league of their own with their definitively radical politics, dystopian vibes, harrowing drones, classical crescendos, intriguing field recordings. There's usually just a lot to Godspeed's records, which traditionally have made them something I can return to again and again and again and uncover new details and meanings each time.
Also, despite the band's music being predominantly instrumental, historically, they do an amazing job of making the intentions behind their work clear as day. They continue that tradition onto this new album here, whose non-title is obviously a reference to what were the Gaza Health Ministry death toll numbers as of the 13th of February this year.
Because indisputably, there is an ongoing genocide happening there in Palestine at the hands of Israel and the Western governments that continue to arm and fund Israel. These violent and militaristic efforts have been expanded quite rapidly over the past month into further colonial encroachment into the West Bank and also bombs that have been directed at Syria and Lebanon and Yemen, not to mention the saber-rattling going on between Israel and Iran right now, too.
These actions have been repeatedly acknowledged as heinous and illegal by numerous UN bodies, doctors, aid workers, human rights groups, and the current death toll in Gaza as of the shooting of this video is well over 40,000. But these official numbers are deeply flawed, I fear, with Gaza's health infrastructure having mostly been reduced to rubble by Israel in the past year. We currently have no way of accounting for the thousands and thousands of people who have gone missing over the past twelve months, or the many more who are on death's door due to being subjected to well over half a year of famine and pestilence forced upon them by the heartless restriction of food and medicine.
In the face of all of this complete and utter insanity, this new Godspeed album is a reminder of two things: the dystopian hell that we're all still living in and funding with our tax dollars, and how powerless artistic expression can feel in the face of such a horrifying reality.
Because really, what song, statue, painting, or sonnet can really capture the urgency and the tragedy created by heartless neocon dinosaurs looking the other way as 2000 pound bombs disintegrate and disembody babies and grandmothers And entire families, really.
I think the only thing a band like Godspeed can really offer in a context such as this, in a way, is hope. Hope that things can eventually get better and efforts to stop the grinding gears of the Hell Machine will eventually prove successful. I think that's what's conveyed by the folksy bright melodies that open up the warmup intro track on the record. I think that's also what's being conveyed in something as simple as the title of the closing track on the record, "Grey Rubble - Green Shoots", the former being pretty much all you see in almost any photo coming out of Gaza these days. But then the green shoots representing plant life or life in general that grows from out of the gray rubble when the storm has passed and the bombing has ended. The music also represents the title of the track pretty accurately, too, with the first half being this very tragic and grim combination of rock and classical music 3/4. Meanwhile, the second half of the song is giving us gentle and shimmering beds of guitar and weepy strings.
Essentially, beyond this, what we get in between these two points, the intro and the outro, is this whirlwind of instrumental power and emotion. "Pale Spectator Takes Photographs", for example, is handily, one of the band's most thunderous tracks in years, with droning bass, wailing strings, and metallic clangs that sound like a warning bell of some sort going off. It's an amazing 11-minute experience that is led into perfectly by "Broken Spires at Dead Capital".
There are a few other monster-sized cuts on the record that add a lot to its quality, too. There's "Raindrops Cast in Lead", which is named after a poem read and recorded for the album itself by a Michele Fuentes, the words of which describe women and children who are martyred before they get the opportunity to see the sunrise of a better world, a track that's instrumental also has just an incredibly searing, bright finish.
There's also "Babies in the Thundercloud", which if you are at all a Godspeed fan, if you followed any of their classic and amazing works up until this point, instrumentally and aesthetically and compositionally, too, I think you will recognize that in many ways this track is just classic Godspeed through and through, which I think for the initial moments of a record like this is fitting, considering the political and social world that Godspeed was born out of, that Godspeed was reacting to in the first place.
Because if anything, the genocide happening currently at this very moment, given that it is being driven by a ghoul as foolish and as self-centered as Netanyahu, who was also very gung-ho for the Iraq War, I might add – sadly, yes, a track like this, a record like this, just goes to show how little political paradigms have changed since the time that Godspeed originally burst onto the scene and were raging against the machine then.
So again, in light of that, a record like this is more than fitting. And the fact that it is written and performed and produced so well is really just the cherry on top. If you want to know how I feel about this record in the grander scheme of Godspeed's catalog, I really feel like it's the best thing they've put out since the band came off of their hiatus in the early 2010s.
But honestly, beyond that, no score.
As of 10 October, 2024, 42,010 dead.
No score.
As of 10 October, 2024, 42,010 dead.
No score.
As of 10 October, 2024, 42,010 dead.
What do you think?
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