Album of the Week: Godspeed You! Black Emperor – NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD
NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD is Canadian post-rock giants Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s eighth full length album and is released this week. GY!BE first gained public attention for a trio of albums released in late 90s/early 00s (F# A# ∞ (1997), Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (2000), Yanqui U.X.O.(2002)) and are as famed for their monumental, long-form compositions that are generally equal in despair and hope as they are for their thirty year refusal to engage with music media. After a seven year hiatus between 2003 and 2010, during which members embarked on various side projects, the band eventually returned on record in 2012 with Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!. An incredible comeback that Introduced a rugged, angrier and all together louder variation of their post-rock sound, one less reliant upon found recordings and collage and more concentrated on the purity of the full band dynamic.
Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! has been followed by a constant stream of albums with both 2015’s Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress and 2017’s Luciferian Towers continuing in a similar vein, though both those records are almost totally absent of hope and beauty. 2021’s superb G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! displayed a distinct return to the classic GY!BE sound, though with a distinctly more technically proficient approach and NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD continues in this vein and features some of GY!BE’s strongest compositions since their reunion. In particular the albums three long-from compositions rival the group’s acclaimed early material.
The new album was, like the majority of GY!BE’s albums, recorded at Hotel2Tango studios, in Montreal, a recording space co-founded by members Efrim Menuck and Thierry Amar. For those already acquainted with GY!BE’s catalogue, NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD begins in familiar, pensive fashion. Opening track SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS begins with a stark, distorted guitar pattern accompanied only by a whirring drone, before being joined by the sombre but pretty strings of Sophie Trudeau’s violin. As guitars, bass and violin are joined by the gentle pitter patter of distant drums, the track reveals itself as very much serving it’s opening purpose as an album introduction, a sobering up of sorts for what is to follow.
The album’s title is a reference to the official number of people killed in Gaza as of the date stated. In a typically pointed press release ahead of the album’s release the explanation for NO TITLE is given as “what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?” and it’s impossible not to agree as the death toll continues to rise well beyond the horrific figure of 28,340. GY!BE are the most prominent band so far to use the release of music to openly address the horrors of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and for a group that forgoes a vocalist and lyrics, the essence of the album is further made clear in the titles of the album’s individual tracks.
BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD is the first of the album’s long-from pieces, a 13-minute sprawl of reverberating, delayed guitars, ethereal, storm-like textures and sweeping, swooning strings. The lonely, gentle notes of guitar and scraping, fluttering waves of feedback and distortion do much to enhance the track’s sense of desolation before being augmented and rooted by patient bass pulses. The crashing of expressive guitars signal a change of pace as the track picks up speed, transitioning in a flash of magic with a swell of ghostly strings and repeating tremolo guitar motifs. The track soars skywards to its momentary conclusion before an extended section showcasing Trudeau’s sublime ability to conjure the most beautifully harrowing sounds from her violin. Trudeau was a star of the band’s last full-length and she again stakes her claim as one of the band’s most crucial members across the entirety of NO TITLE… BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD concludes with a triumphant, almost hopeful climax of Efrim Menuck, David Bryant and Michael Moya’s racing guitars, strings and Aidan Girt and Timothy Herzog’s pounding drums rich in sheer emotional power. The track expertly displays GY!BE’s talent for drawing considerable beauty and euphoria out of anguish.
In what could be considered something of a “power move”, the excellence of BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD is followed by another 13-minute highlight, RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD. Here the climactic build is more linear, as the band kick up a serious storm through synth drones, anthemic guitar, colossal percussive pummel and majestic strings to reach stratospheric heights in a way that often only this Canadian 8-piece band can. While GY!BE have many contemporaries and followers, arguably not one of them can truly match the emotion that GY!BE so frequently muster. Midway through RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD, the album’s sole vocal sample is introduced, a French female voice speaking across what appears to be a public address system. The sample temporarily interrupts the track’s path, to instead reconfigure it and set it on a course towards its enthralling out-rock conclusion.
Across these two epic tracks, as with much of their post-hiatus albums, the band resemble something more psychedelic, progressive and distinctly jam-band-like than on earlier recordings. There is a real sense of the joy of live collaboration present and the telepathic interlocking of different components, particularly when Trudeau’s strings begin to wail in tandem with the increasingly riotous, shredded blasts of metallic guitar, is genuinely exciting and mesmeric to witness.
NO TITLE… could logically conclude with RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD and listeners would certainly be more than happy, but luckily for us that track only brings to an end one half of this extraordinary album. The second half of NO TITLE… begins with the bleak atmospherics of BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL, and the sound of fragmentary guitars, strangled strings and deep, solemn drones harkens back to some of the group’s disturbing passages on F# A# ∞ and Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. From here the track segues seamlessly in to PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS, the third and final long-form piece on the album.
Certainly the most unsettling and darkest track on the album, PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS re-introduces the angrier and more chaotic side to GY!BE’s dynamic, and is snake-like in its ominous, slithery build of defiant drums, rasping violins and scorched, air-raid like guitars that menacingly lurch, growl and eventually shift into GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS. The opening of this track shows the band at their most thunderously oppositional, and Trudeau’s pirouetting strings are particularly enthralling as they accompany the explosive clanging of guitars, bass and drums to amplify the enveloping, dramatic effect. GY!BE’s dedication to expressively mirror the depravity and horrors of war is relentless on NO TITLE…, and it is such dedication that definitively sets them apart from their contemporaries.
To my knowledge as far as CD copies of the album go GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS is the final track. On vinyl copies side D is home to an unlisted and untitled “hidden” track. This track, which I assume will become known as NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD, is amongst the most beautifully immersive music GY!BE have ever released. Akin to the interludes of manipulated sound that can be found on their earliest recordings, the untitled track is composed of what appears to be snippets of found and recorded sound put together in a manner that is haunting, ethereal and genuinely moving. A vast, mournful swell of ambient sound that transmits an amorphous, vaporous drift of hope amidst horror through the ether, encircling and engulfing all within its path.
With NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD Godspeed You! Black Emperor have released an album that will not only be one of the 2024’s most essential releases but one that equals the majority of their greatest ever work.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor ~ NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD is OUT NOW on vinyl 2LP and CD.
Alan Sparhawk ~ White Roses, My God is OUT NOW on crystal clear vinyl & CD.
