Lounge
Full-volume fury: Godspeed You! Black Emperor returns
Summary
Godspeed You! Black Emperor have never hidden their message behind artful vagueness or enigmatic mystique
A lonesome guitar drone kicks off Grey Rubble—Green Shoots, the surprise-dropped lead single off the upcoming album by Canadian orchestral anarcho-punks Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It’s the sort of funereal, reverb-drenched keen that shatters the silence following a pre-dawn bombing raid, a wail of unadulterated despair stabbing at the sky. More instruments join in—guitars, drums, Sophie Trudeau’s baleful violin—building up to a slow-burn crescendo, as the sun rises over a scene of gut-wrenching devastation. Painting in broad, looping brushstrokes, the band conjures up a desolate landscape.
As with most of GB!YE’s music, the song is purely instrumental. You don’t really need words to understand the tragic context from which Grey Rubble draws its blistering fury and suffocating dolour. But, unlike the post-rock contemporaries they had such a huge influence on, GB!YE have never hidden their message behind artful vagueness or enigmatic mystique. So they spell it out in the text that accompanies the single. “Every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom," it reads. The album’s name makes it even more explicit—NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD.
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It seems inevitable that the ongoing blood-letting in Gaza would drive GB!YE back to the studio, threnodic guitars and martial drums raging against the industrial slaughter. For decades now, the band has deployed guitars, strings, horns and tape loops in full-throated critique of neoliberal capitalism, and the depredations it has inflicted on the world.
The first iteration of GB!YE came together in Montreal in 1994, soon after Francis Fukuyama had declared the end of history. The Cold War had ended and capitalism had won. The anti-establishment and anti-capitalist fervour that had so animated underground punk and noise scenes in the 1980s had become increasingly co-opted, DIY labels turning into cottage-capitalist enterprises while their musical heroes signed on to major labels. But the late-capitalist malaise that inspired those musical rebellions still infected the body politic, entrenching itself even further under the cover of that brief period of euphoria.
GB!YE’s first full-length album, 1997’s F#A#∞, crashed headlong into that illusory post-ideological rapture, ripping away the veil to reveal the rot underneath. Sixteen-and-a-half minute opener The Dead Flag Blues opens with a monologue straight out of an urban re-imagination of Apocalypse Now. “We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine," intones a low, gravelly voice, “And the machine is bleeding to death." The voice’s references to corrupt governments and “a thousand lonely suicides" set the scene for the album’s epic exploration of urban decay and industrial decline.
2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven—their third studio release, following the 1999 EP Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada—cemented the band’s reputation as contemporary rock music’s Jeremiah, the Hebrew Bible’s weeping prophet who warned of the consequences of Judah’s spiritual and moral decay. The album’s four titanic movements—the shortest one clocks in at nearly 19 minutes—swell and ebb in waves of droning guitar and melancholic strings, circuitous loops of slowly building tension that build to crushing crescendos of apocalyptic paranoia.
Field recordings of industrial noise and sampled recordings of radio preachers hint at the record’s major themes—the emerging police state, the infuriating rise of global capital, and despite it all, the persistence of hope. The liner notes dedicate the album to “quiet refusals, loud refusals and sad refusals", the act of saying no to power, greed and human evil.
2002’s follow-up Yanqui U.X.O is an album that—barring certain specificities—could have been made today. The album’s back cover depicts the relationships between major record labels and arms manufacturers, while liner notes describe the song 09-15-00, which sounds like an orchestral accompaniment to civilisational collapse, as “Ariel Sharon surrounded by 1,000 Israeli soldiers marching on al-Haram Ash-Sharif & provoking another Intifada." The album’s relentless, oppressive bleakness was a sharp turn from the hope that—hesitantly, quietly—bloomed on the previous album, and the band soon went on an indefinite hiatus.
GB!YE reunited in 2012, another key turning point in American politics, as the Tea Party—the forerunners of today’s MAGA Republicans—drove a stake straight into the heart of America’s neoliberal consensus, already fraying after the 2008 financial crisis. The four albums they have released since—from 2012’s Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! to 2021’s G_d’s Pee at State’s End!—have taken the gloom and feverish anxiety of the past decade and transformed them into moments of grand beauty that carry within them the possibility of a better future. There’s an urgency to these records and a fullness to their music—characterised by shorter, more purposeful compositions—that leans further into the punk idea of nihilism as the starting point for revolution.
After years of warning of God’s judgement for Judah’s wickedness, for which he was relentlessly persecuted, Jeremiah found his visions coming true. Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar’s armies took Jerusalem, sacking the Temple and deporting its citizens to Babylon. In his people’s darkest hour, full of despair, this prophet of Doom offered them hope of a future where Israel would be restored to God’s grace. In the latter half of Grey Rubble—Green Shoots, the Sturm und Drang gives way to a gentle waltz between soulful guitar, violin and cello, a delicate nod to the promise of renewal and justice.
“The old world order barely pretended to care," reads the accompanying text. “This new century will be crueler still. War is coming. Don’t give up. Pick a side. Hang on."
Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.
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