Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Luciferian Towers
A Closer Listen
This is the third album since Godspeed You! Black Emperor‘s studio return five years ago, mirroring their output from 1997-2002. By now it’s fair to say that this isn’t just a band returned, it’s a band rejuvenated. So what’s happened in the last two years to provoke them to record new music? Oh, not much. Just Brexit and Trump, a few bombings and border closings, a refugee crisis and the continuing wrath of Mother Nature. The visual component of the tour should be harrowing.
As common for the recent incarnation, samples are absent. No more homeless monologues or minarets. The anger is saved for the cover, which prints lyrics not found in the songs, including images of “pale cops” and “drone pilots”. One section is labeled “voiceover”, and offers bitter words: “The empty-faced undersecretary of we-all-fucking-die absconds to private island. We get left in the gathering flames, the scorched detritus of their dull vanities.” It’s fair to say that GY!BE is mad. But aren’t we all? The challenge is in the response. Most people resist giving in to what they hate, but it’s hard to see through the red.
This is where GY!BE’s music comes in. Politics aside, this is powerful music. Anyone who has ever heard the band live remembers the visceral experience. One feels charged, electric, deaf yet yelling, ready to take on the world. And while the band’s pacing has often been glacial, Luciferian Towers is virtually all rock despite the builds. Only the center of Side B is placid. There’s no waiting to get to the good stuff; it’s all good stuff. This being said, the end of each side also includes a memorable melodic shift, one that would be welcome to stay for another few minutes if it didn’t run out of time. And here we are, all running out of time.
The horns on the title track are but a harbinger of things to come: steady tempos shielding savage scenarios, military drums signifying a march off the precipice. So much squall, like voices insisting their volume is truth. Finally at the very end, some sanity, represented by the clarity of chords. The band will use this technique throughout the album, chaos giving way to order, cacophony to clarity. We wish the same for our world. This is the one thing we didn’t expect to hear through the haze of all that anger: hope. One need not be an anarchist to relate to the horizontal yearning of “Bosses Hang”, although the title implies a type of social activism we can’t advocate and don’t recommend.
Sophie Trudeau’s violins play a major role on Side B, gracing the music with an air of elegance, a deep trauma balanced by a deeper resolve. “Fam/Famine” falls back to afford her room. This makes the soft launch of “Anthem for No State”, a half hour into the album, such a sweet reprieve. Even the guitars bow down, borrowing a tinge of the Old West, a time when violence and hope rode stirrup and horse, hand in reins. By the end of “Anthem for No State”, as all violins and violence fade, the end result is enervating. No one got hurt. We’re all still here. We’ve lived through the darkness and are ready to stumble toward the light. (Richard Allen)
Mon Sep 18 00:01:40 GMT 2017Pitchfork 73
The sound of Godspeed’s radical fury takes a sideline on their impeccably composed sixth album. It contains their most melodic and powerfully positive-sounding music to date.
Thu Sep 21 05:00:00 GMT 2017Drowned In Sound 70
It’s always been a notable duality of Godspeed You! Black Emperor that the Montreal collective combine some of the most radical politics in the entertainment industry with virtually instrumental music. Far from neutering their politics, their beautiful, apocalyptic torrents of sound feel more profound for not having their grandeur shackled by the banality of language, for letting the listener imagine meaning.
And yet that’s not the whole story: knowledge of the band’s intent and politics is clearly important, and that goes beyond simply having a dim idea that they'd probably quite like to overthrow capitalism. Each Godspeed album is a physical package – a work of art – in which the music is surrounded by other signifiers. The song names; the album name; the artwork, including any other words on the cover.
"Luciferian Towers" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
The band’s sixth album - third since their gratifyingly seamless reformation – is their gentlest to date, 44 minutes of music arranged around a single, dreamy riff/motif. Listen to it on Bandcamp or Spotify without checking out the other stuff that comes with the music and it perhaps seems like a retreat from the sturm und drang of their previous work. But the accompanying words and art to Luciferian Towers posit it as the band’s most politicised set since Yanqui UXO, imbued with a seething paranoia and stark contempt for authority, that sits at odds with the loveliness of much of the set, which only occasionally reaches a screeching head of steam.
‘The empty-faced undersecretary of we-all-fucking-die absconds to private island, we get left in the gathering flames, the scorched detritus of their dull vanities. We asked for basic needs. All they ever said was nothing,’ run a section of text on the inner sleeve.
And yes, you could probably argue that it’s just a bunch of cool-sounding words, but it politicises the music. Giving a beautiful, lullaby-like three-part-song the name ‘Bosses Hang’ politicises the music. And the image of crumbling spires left to rot by uncaring bureaucrats can’t help but give Luciferian Towers a certain sickly resonance post-Grenfell. Of course the music was written and album conceived long before the tragedy (projections of skyscrapers were used to back ‘Bosses Hang’ when it was aired live in 2016), and if the record was inspired by anything in particular it would presumably be something Canadian (one doesn’t get the impression Godspeed suffer from Trudeaumania). But it feels emblematic of the appeal of the band, that their work effortlessly recontextualises itself around troubled times.
Now, you may legitimately wonder if the preceding is all just sub-Barthes fanboy gymnastics designed to attribute significance to a record that’s not been hailed as Godspeed’s best. But I can see that too: I don’t think there’s a quality problem with Luciferian Towers, but it’s certainly the band’s most homogenous, least dramatic album. Even more so than Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress it feels like a single movement of music, when all their previous sets included at least a couple. To be sure there are huge tonal differences between the two named pieces of music that effectively make up the record: ‘Bosses Hang’ has an almost shoegaze-like gentleness, while ‘Anthem for No State’ reprises the earlier motifs with a heady mix of guitars buzzing like an angry swarm and a mariachi-like quality – the same sense of outdoors and human desert conveyed on F♯ A♯ ∞, but with an appealing spirit of adventure, a surging twinge of hope. And there is something magnificent about the cavernousness of sound, and letting a single movement go on such a voyage.
Perhaps if there is a feeling of hope to the record it ties in with the last piece of accompanying context to the album: the 'press release' that announced it, a series of utopian demands ('an end to borders' 'the total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex'). The album's drone opener is called 'Undoing a Luciferian Towers', and I think perhaps that's really what the album is, a condemnation of this sick world and a dream of a happier new one.
But ultimately it feels like one beautifully-realised idea, when even their Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP featured two. It would have been cool if it was a double with another movement of music, I guess. But frankly it still feels pretty incredible to only have such trivial criticisms to make of the band in 2017: now deep into middle age, perhaps Godspeed are slowing down a little, but their music and their rage remain undimmed and beautiful.
Mon Sep 25 14:43:18 GMT 2017Drowned In Sound 70
It’s always been a notable duality of Godspeed You! Black Emperor that the Montreal collective combine some of the most radical politics in the entertainment industry with virtually instrumental music. Far from neutering their politics, their beautiful, apocalyptic torrents of sound feel more profound for not having their grandeur shackled by the banality of language, for letting the listener imagine meaning.
And yet that’s not the whole story: knowledge of the band’s intent and politics is clearly important, and that goes beyond simply having a dim idea that they'd probably quite like to overthrow capitalism. Each Godspeed album is a physical package – a work of art – in which the music is surrounded by other signifiers. The song names; the album name; the artwork, including any other words on the cover.
"Luciferian Towers" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
The band’s sixth album - third since their gratifyingly seamless reformation – is their gentlest to date, 44 minutes of music arranged around a single, dreamy riff/motif. Listen to it on Bandcamp or Spotify without checking out the other stuff that comes with the music and it perhaps seems like a retreat from the sturm und drang of their previous work. But the accompanying words and art to Luciferian Towers posit it as the band’s most politicised set since Yanqui UXO, imbued with a seething paranoia and stark contempt for authority, that sits at odds with the loveliness of much of the set, which only occasionally reaches a screeching head of steam.
‘The empty-faced undersecretary of we-all-fucking-die absconds to private island, we get left in the gathering flames, the scorched detritus of their dull vanities. We asked for basic needs. All they ever said was nothing,’ run a section of text on the inner sleeve.
And yes, you could probably argue that it’s just a bunch of cool-sounding words, but it politicises the music. Giving a beautiful, lullaby-like three-part-song the name ‘Bosses Hang’ politicises the music. And the image of crumbling spires left to rot by uncaring bureaucrats can’t help but give Luciferian Towers a certain sickly resonance post-Grenfell. Of course the music was written and album conceived long before the tragedy (projections of skyscrapers were used to back ‘Bosses Hang’ when it was aired live in 2016), and if the record was inspired by anything in particular it would presumably be something Canadian (one doesn’t get the impression Godspeed suffer from Trudeaumania). But it feels emblematic of the appeal of the band, that their work effortlessly recontextualises itself around troubled times.
Now, you may legitimately wonder if the preceding is all just sub-Barthes fanboy gymnastics designed to attribute significance to a record that’s not been hailed as Godspeed’s best. But I can see that too: I don’t think there’s a quality problem with Luciferian Towers, but it’s certainly the band’s most homogenous, least dramatic album. Even more so than Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress it feels like a single movement of music, when all their previous sets included at least a couple. To be sure there are huge tonal differences between the two named pieces of music that effectively make up the record: ‘Bosses Hang’ has an almost shoegaze-like gentleness, while ‘Anthem for No State’ reprises the earlier motifs with a heady mix of guitars buzzing like an angry swarm and a mariachi-like quality – the same sense of outdoors and human desert conveyed on F♯ A♯ ∞, but with an appealing spirit of adventure, a surging twinge of hope. And there is something magnificent about the cavernousness of sound, and letting a single movement go on such a voyage.
Perhaps if there is a feeling of hope to the record it ties in with the last piece of accompanying context to the album: the 'press release' that announced it, a series of utopian demands ('an end to borders' 'the total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex'). The album's drone opener is called 'Undoing a Luciferian Towers', and I think perhaps that's really what the album is, a condemnation of this sick world and a dream of a happier new one.
But ultimately it feels like one beautifully-realised idea, when even their Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP featured two. It would have been cool if it was a double with another movement of music, I guess. But frankly it still feels pretty incredible to only have such trivial criticisms to make of the band in 2017: now deep into middle age, perhaps Godspeed are slowing down a little, but their music and their rage remain undimmed and beautiful.
Mon Sep 25 14:43:18 GMT 2017The Guardian 60
(Constellation)
The Canadian anti-capitalist post-rockers rage against the machine once more, making a list of demands in the liner notes including “an end to borders” and “the expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again”. Their lyric-free music evokes that political chaos – unmoored sheets of symphonic guitars blow through everything, as brass and woodwind howl at each other like red and blue states. But there’s also a kind of hope in the way that these elements eventually cohere around massive melodies, like a New Orleans brass band finding each other in a hurricane. And even if the building dynamics are the stuff of post-rock cliche, the multi-part suites Bosses Hang and Anthem for No State are saved from vague posturing by urgent rhythm sections powering them over the barricades.
Continue reading... Thu Sep 21 21:15:29 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 40
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Luciferian Towers
[Constellation; 2017]
Rating: 2/5
“When the businessman whom his acquaintance asks for a job refuses because conditions don’t permit it, he thinks he is referring to something purely objective and totally autonomous — reality itself. Since everyone else, including the petitioner, feels the same because the reality they themselves created through their social activity appears as something alien by which they must abide, it follows that there are many agents but no conscious and therefore free subjects of social conditions. Men must submit to conditions they themselves constantly create as to something alien and overwhelming powerful. Insight is not enough, of course, to change this state of affairs.”
– Max Horkheimer, “The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom,” Dämmerung
The general thesis from which many of today’s artists proceed is “X is wrong with the world.” So they set off to write an album or make a film or create a painting about X. The product is released, and some people “get it” and some don’t. The ones who “get it” spend some time thinking and listening and looking. They digest some aspects of the work and then move on with their lives and generally keep doing the same shit that they were doing before this aesthetic experience. In some cases, a distorted fragment of the message gets through and the listener decides to implement a minor reform in their life, like riding their bike more, ceasing to use Amazon, or quitting eating meat. They become convinced that this action will make an impact on the world, but the fact is that it likely will not.
In a certain sense, the failure is on both sides: artists today are mostly incapable of making works that meaningfully critique the world we live in, and listeners are increasingly incapable of recognizing such works, if and when they exist at all. It’s a self-reproducing cycle, and one that can’t be broken until things actually change, i.e., until there’s a new system of production. Until then, capital persists, the culture industry continues to dominate all aesthetic experience, and the people in charge remain in charge. Whether you eat meat or use Amazon ultimately only affects you. 2017 has been a big year for music that says “X is bad” or “Don’t do or be X.” Ultimately, this kind of art just boils down to the sensual representation of the artist’s own moral platitudes and the expectation that people will extrapolate political directives from them. If your art isn’t critical at a fundamental formal level, which is to say that it works to develop, destroy, or transform existing aesthetic forms, then it’s just shaking a fist at the sky and waiting for someone else to come along to do the heavy lifting. That doesn’t mean that all “self-aware” “political” art is horrible today, but… well, most of it is.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Luciferian Towers is a decent album, but its music is often overshadowed by its imagery and the music’s own self-important, funereal vibe concerning the existence of some monolithic, destructive force. “look at that fucking skyline!,” the album’s press release says. “big lazy money writ in dull marble obelisks!” Hm, Luciferian Towers. Which world figure has been compared to Lucifer and has his name on many towers? Even if it’s not literally about “him,” it doesn’t matter — the band has already showed their hand. The press release concludes with:
the “luciferian towers” L.P. was informed by the following grand demands:
+ an end to foreign invasions
+ an end to borders
+ the total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex
+ healthcare, housing, food and water acknowledged as an inalienable human right
+ the expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again
Looking beyond basic philosophy that would contradict a claim that healthcare, housing, food and water are basic human rights (they aren’t), and ignoring the list’s typically liberal hopscotching over any political or philosophical theory that could actually help obtain these demands, it’s still hard to take this seriously at all. It’s perhaps one step above Occupy Wall Street, but not by too much. If your argument as to why these demands should be met is to release a good post-rock album, that’s fine, but I fail to see a bridge between the music and any of these goals being met. The band writes of song triptych “Bosses Hang,” “labor, alienated from the wealth it creates, so that holy cow, most of us live precariously!” Congrats, you’ve (maybe) read Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844! That text deserves better than tongue-in-cheek allusions in a press release written by a real-life Wes Anderson character.
OK. Music. “Undoing A Luciferian Towers” is fine GY!BE post-rock, a dark, carnivalesque track whose pacing and harmonic shifts feel like Fuck Buttons-meets-Anton Bruckner. But overall, these tracks feel less direct than the prior GY!BE 2.0 releases, and they don’t have the depth of orchestration of the band’s greatest works, instead opting to focus on big sounds and tour de force tension. This is good in theory, and it sometimes works, but I nevertheless found myself yearning for the heaviness of doom metal-tinged Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress and the melodic intensity, deep layering, and sheer instrumental ingenuity of ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!’.
One of GY!BE’s strengths is coming up with motifs that sound good and work for long periods of time, but that strength isn’t utilized here as much as it could be. “Bosses Hang” parts I-III are mostly entrancing (especially the second movement), but the third movement’s Steve Reich-esque ostinato becomes grating the longer it goes on. Working against the grand washes of guitar and bass, which are beautiful, it just feels a little uninspired, especially in the final movement’s bathetic second half. Similarly, the first two movements of “Anthem For No State” are shimmering and expansive, while the third movement contains excellent dramatic moments but ultimately comes across as a lengthy hard jam that, while good, somehow falls short of the dramatic grandeur we’ve come to expect from the band. A lot of this is squarely the music’s fault, but it’s also partially the “Koyaanisqatsi of 2017” experience promised by the album’s notes.
On the whole, these tracks feel partially-realized, like demos that didn’t get wholly fleshed out. All musicians know that magical, drunken fourth hour of band practice, the bracket of time when everyone enters into a shared trance, producing what the band collectively regards as “the best thing we’ve ever done.” It is only later, via the wonders of recording technology and critical distance, that the song is revealed not to be so. It would be uncharitable to apply this metaphor to the entirety of Luciferian Towers, but there are moments when it feels apt. As a result, the whole record feels halfway there. On the back of the CD slip case, there’s a photo of something indiscernible — possibly some trees and water — with a caption that says “BROWNSHIRTS DROWN IN GLACIERS’ RISE.” Well, I imagine if we keep pressing albums on plastic and packaging them in cardboard, it’ll happen eventually. We’re all part of the system.