The tireless revolutionaries of Godspeed You! Black Emperor we return this week with an album without a title, or simply with an album whose title does not claim to be one: NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD. Nearly 30,000 Gazans dead, as of February 13, 2024, since the Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalated again last year. Not a single second of the project has been listened to that the listener is already confronted with this inevitable violence. “Dear fan, too much blood has flowed on the other side of the globe, you will not have the right to a title. ” Very Godspeedall that.
The first piece of the album, SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORSbegins in a metallic and vaporous atmosphere. The cross-hatched guitar is heard, Sophie Trudeau’s violin as well, but it is hard to clearly discern other instruments in this introduction. SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS seems a bit…soft and scattered? The five-minute piece truly acts as a preamble and does not pretend to be a Lad or a The Dead Flag Bluescomparing it to other entries in terms of GY!BE.
Three long pieces then punctuate the album (the fourth and fifth songs are actually one) in a style specific to Godspeed : crescendo, crash on the climax, then decrescendo. You wouldn’t ask the Stones to do anything other than rock after a 60-year career, so why ask GY!BE to renew oneself after only 30 years of music, eh! BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD is particularly heady, with a beautiful distant echo effect broken by an incessant major third carried by the bass, like the torture of the drop of water. Tock, tock, tock. The rhythm accelerates, the cadence does not stop, the interval repeats, repeats and repeats again.
Good song, but the next two are even better. The sounds of nature, birds on RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD give way to an electric guitar reverb taking on more and more importance. The instruments are added little by little, the tornado roars. The first rise is interesting, but it’s the incredible second crescendo that steals the show. The members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor alternate between the major chords of fa and of B flat at the second inversion for a few minutes. The moment is particularly noisy and “pop”, one would almost expect Efrim Menuck or someone else to start singing! Rare are the moments when we hear Godspeed also be harmonically “classic”, if I can put it that way.
The three and a half minutes of BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL contain a deeply controlled dramatic character while PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHScontinuing without pause on the previous song, delivers an interlude with a slight but perceptible influence of Arabic music. The sharp echo of the guitars becomes more and more present, we feel like it’s going to explode any minute. GY!BE takes the time to tame the listener before delivering one of his last blows. And what a blow, that said! The penultimate piece of the album is by far the most anxiety-inducing of this latest opus, it gives you real chills.
GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS closes the disc with the most striking intervention of the indispensable Sophie Trudeau. On a prog rhythm, quietly, Godspeed You! Black Emperor disappears. Calmly. Agreement of do minor on guitar, then it’s over for good. Green shoots are blooming on the rubble of Gaza. So pessimistic as that then, the Godspeed?
As the big man Louis-Phillipe Labrèche wrote so well a few days ago in the top of the Auditory Canal albums of Godspeedthe Montreal band simply seems incapable of making a bad album. There is some very good stuff, and there is some very, very good stuff in the bunch. NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD rather belongs to the first category. None of the pieces on the album exceed 15 minutes, perhaps the sauce should have been lengthened to make the crescendos all the more grandiose and caustic? Rhetorical question. Well no, maybe not, we’ll see him in concert.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor no longer delivers timeless masterpieces to us today as he was capable of doing at the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, but to release a fabulous album like NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD after around ten projects launched, it is probably not for everyone.
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