'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!
Godspeed
You! Black Emperor
Constellation Records.
SCQ Rating: 85%
There’s a reason the
shanty-house manning the cover of GY!BE’s first studio record in ten years has
the mystique of a portal. These four cuts – two expansively detailed guitar
workouts and two experimental blurs – return post-rock to its earthly pleasures,
where friction and abrasiveness make a journey of the joys and sorrows so
exploited in indie-rock these days. Much like, say, chill-wave’s canned
euphoria, post-rock has been rightly accused of abiding by a predictable code.
And although the group’s long-awaited return features tracks they’d been
performing live way back in 2003, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have reinvigorated the genre’s waning trademarks. The slow build of "Mladic" erupts in a way nobody could’ve
anticipated. “We Drift Like Worried Fire” snakes
its way through a classical body, finding beauty within savagery and vice
versa. And, for the life of me, I still can’t pull much from muddied ambient
tracks "Their Helicopters Sing" and "Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable"; they’re unofficial comedown epilogues to preceding epics
that leave me as speechless as Godspeed have ever left me.
