"The car's on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows..."
Godspeed You Black Emperor! (or Godspeed You! Black Emperor, depending on when in their career you are talking about, apparently) are difficult to try and pin down. A friend of mine once asked, somewhat concerned, if they were "Satanic" -- but I think it was probably the "black emperor" part that gave him that impression. What he makes of the Rolling Stones "Satanic Majesty" I don't know...
I know very little about the band, other than that they are Canadian -- and that much you can gather yourself from the narrator's voice. Reading about them reveals little more than you can infer from their music, and reputation. The band formed in 1993 with three members, has had as many as 15 at one point, but more consistently has nine. They are currently on an 'indefinite hiatus'.
Almost everything about the band in theory makes me want to hate them. A band named after an obscure Japanese documentary made in the 70s, making records with vast, sweeping movements including instruments like bagpipes and glockenspiels and who generally refuse interviews to the mainstream media. You want to tell them to lighten up.
But the album F# A# (Infinity) is an epic, post-rock masterpiece and I could care less about what silly names their side projects have, or how arty they are -- all I care about is the music, and how it makes me feel. And for me, the music sounds like a post-apocalypse Spaghetti Western.
Politically, their music reminds me of the anarchist Edward Abbey -- perhaps the references to "leering billboards" remind me of "falling billboards, falling in flames" of his 'Direct Action Committee', and maybe one influenced the other. It's probably unsurprising the band were once detained and questioned on suspicion of being terrorists.
Uneasy, difficult, and even a little disturbing -- The Dead Flag Blues narrates a nightmarish apocalypse, but juxtaposes the destruction with the phrase "I said, 'Kiss me, you're beautiful...These are truly the last days".
What's not to like?
I couldn't get this through castpost - either my comp or castpost is playing up :( But I downloaded it instead.
ReplyDeleteI was very ready to hate this, because I used to chat at this nine inch nails forums where a few of the more pretentious arseholes were into GYBE and wouldn't bloody shut the hell up about them. I'm not into being pretentious about music and NIN based pretentious arseholes are probably the worse kind! But I liked this, it was pretty cool. Thanks for the info.
you are still alive, aren't you?
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