Godspeed
You! Black Emperor
Allelujah!
Don't Bend! Ascend!
Constellation
There
were always going to be any number of ways to approach this record,
that the the writer rushes through serially or all at once: slowly,
feeling out its subtleties and flaws, living with it as sound, as he
once did with all the records that preceded it, or quick, in
gut-level affirmation or negation, assigning it to its ready
pigeonhole, freeing himself from the obligation to think about it
further; as the reappearance of one of the most politically vital
bands of the last 20 years, or as an intervention into a changed
historical landscape that renders their critiques obsolete; as the
pretext for autobiographical riot or faux-disinterested critical
appraisal; as reaffirmation of the dignity of indie, so degraded
since F# A# Infinity came out
in 1997 or as experimental (whatever that means now) miasma;
as a fractional addition to a monolithic body of work, or the best
thing they've ever done.
The
depths of ambivalence or contradiction that Allelujah! Don't Bend!
Ascend! provokes is justified
enough by the album's substance to conclude that isn't simply the
projection of this writer, already overfond of ambiguity. That title,
with its almost parodically positivist screamers, is nicely
misleading regarding the content. It would have been easy enough on
re-emerging in 2010, especially given the somewhat lukewarm work that
their sister act A Silver Mount Zion have been doing in the last few
years, for Godspeed to play to the assumed image of what 'Godspeed'
are: the big, parabolic structures, the soaring climaxes, the earnest
altermondialiste
politics that made sense in Seattle circa 1999. This would be to
ignore the contradictions and ironies and aporias present in the band
from the beginning. The apparently total purity of intent expressed
in fleeting interviews and lo-fi sleeve artwork (not to mention the
infamously mordant monologue at the start of 'The Dead Flag Blues',
the first track on the first album: “The car is on fire and there's
no driver at the wheel...”) was always altered in its charge by its
presentation – the jokes (who didn't think the dedication to “the
Reverend Gary Davis” was at least slightly funny?), the collision
of different materials in the inner sleeve collages, the conflicting
energies and textures of the songs, sliding and grinding from rage to
placidity to uninvited noise to lullabies. The albums were, as the
band suggested in a recent Guardian interview,
“a joyous difficult noise”: their aesthetics bear the closest
relation to punk, detonating their conflicting materials through
negation, antagonism, to produce works of strange and searing energy.
(The distance from Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts'
council estate branded “Land Of Milk And Honey” to “Fuck la loi
78” on the sleeve of Allelujah!... is
shorter than we might choose to think.)
All
of this is a slightly roundabout way of saying two things. One: it
turns out that the things about the band that enthralled the first
time around – the sincerity, the leftism, the obscurity, the
extremes of sound – were as much pop hook and manifesto as, say,
anything in the early canon of Adam and the Ants (as masterfullyanalysed last week by Mark Sinker)
– and that this is precisely
where their politics, and their brilliance, reside. (Certainly when,
on the last few Silver Mount Zion albums, Efrim Menuck's vocals have
been unimpededly front-and-centre, the desperation seething within
the collective's songs has been written in ten-foot-high slogans,
untouched by context or irony, the results have been either comical
or too painful to keep up.) Two: a decade's hiatus has given them the
chance to sound more like themselves, as a collective entity, an
idea, a mass of interacting forces, a project and intervention
operating according to what they call their own “particular
stubborn calculus”; more like Godspeed than 'Godspeed'. The two
long tracks, 'Mladic' and 'We Drift Like Worried Fire', apportioned
to a side each, press together all of their seemingly incompatible
elements, and do so in a stronger, more boldly articulated way than
the somewhat episodic progress of their last major statement, 2000's
Lift Yr Skinny Fists
Like Antennas To Heaven.
The band sound here more like a collective sound generator than, as
they did sometimes on previous records, a big band in which every
section has to have its turn, as it were. Rather, field
recordings, lambent drones, melody, concatenations of guitar noise,
strings that veer into shredding atonality and back again, are all
folded into structures whose thematic successions or juxtapositions
feel dreamlike or counterintuitive. (The short tracks – 'Their
Helicopters Sing' and 'Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable' –
do something different, but more of that anon.) In this it reconnects
with the distant, seemingly halcyon days when post-rock meant
feverish drift through rock's debris – Disco Inferno, Gastr Del
Sol, Bark Psychosis, Pram – rather than white guys playing rock
slowly whilst looking sad. (Ten years of listening to other stuff has
also allowed us to notice things like this.)
It's
tempting at this point to zoom in on significant details – whether
to draw a curtain over what opposition there might be to our
preceding argument, or to highlight the strange political freight the
record carries, or just because they sound so lovely: the jumping
clatter of the Montreal casseroles
at
the end of 'Mladic'; the strafing slide guitar that starts about 2
minutes into that track; the scything
treble guitar noise that cuts through the middle of 'We Drift...';
the wonky ebb to which the crackling noise of 'Strung Like Lights...'
dwindles, as if heard on tape. But the tracks deserve to be taken in
their entirety: 'Mladic' as a slow, groaning build to a thundering
foment that breaks off, reiterates parts of itself – guitars
strangled into noise as the drums – and slides into drawn-out
breakdown, flaring up and burning out over and over; 'We Drift...'
as a low, gathering drone that reaches a peak of treble noise
simultaneously light as air and crushingly static, before a long,
intricate patchwork of musical gestures leads into the repeated,
ecstatic thrash of the ending. Pitchfork's
Mark Richardson sees in 'Mladic' “the
pummeling repetition of Swans and the fiendish drama of metal”, and
certainly there's something of the latter-day Swans of 'Eden Prison'
to it: harsh, pounding, with heavy mid-range and bass frequencies,
but never locked into a temporally bound, teleological form, ready to
stray into side-roads of atonal noise, its peeling apart from the
central groove and remaking itself become the unfolding of its drama.
(Notably there are moments when the drumming recalls a heavier
version of Steve Shelley circa Daydream
Nation, supporting
and puncturing the song in equal measure.)
The long tracks here are, nonetheless, hard to experience or hold in
memory as entireties – too big, too detailed, too multiple. (We
should put a word in here for the production of both Howard Bilerman,
who recorded the long tracks, and the four members of Godspeed who
recorded the short ones: there's a remarkable clarity and
depth-of-field, the clashes or layerings of instruments satisfyingly
dense without being mushy or congealed.) Gone is the guilty thought
prompted by Yanqui
U.X.O. that
every next move was, if not predictable,
at least intuitable; for the moment, it's all a surprise.
But
more than all that, there's a palpable fierceness, a disciplined
savagery, to the playing here – no doubt honed over a long period
(both long tunes have been in the band's live repertoire, more or
less, since before their hiatus in 2003), but not polished. Which
makes what comes afterwards more genuine: the two shorter tracks
(relegated to a dropped-in 7” on the vinyl version) each explore a
moment that would have formed part of the succession of the longer
tracks, probing atmospheres of breakdown, exhaustion and drift as if
opening up the microcosmic heart of their work. 'Their Helicopters
Sing' layers an almost improvisatory clash of circling, scraping
string phrases over tape-drone and guitar that moves from hesitant to
looming, as if choking back the fury that animated the violins on
'Mladic'. At this point, wearing my contrarian hat, I'll say that
'Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable' is the best thing on
the album: bleeding in from the cut-off quiet at the end of 'We
Drift...', it presents a rich, troubled drone, treble noise, heavy
with the sound of instruments' resistant materiality – mistreated
strings and e-bowed guitar – gathering and breaking over deeper,
woozy pulses that come from nowhere and disappear just as
mysteriously. It condenses and suggests the flicker, flash and clash
of their collective elements, off to one side.
There's
as much of a palpable freight to these obscured moments, these
negatives of the fullness and presence of rock – and, as is always
also the case, rock as a carrier of political discourse – as where
they left off a decade ago: the brilliant first ten minutes of
'Motherfucker=Redeemer',
the following cut-up of George W. Bush that, as Anwyn Crawford has
pointed out, his “sound
like – morph into – gunfire.” The most poignant moment in the
Guardian
interview
comes when they talk about “the dull fact” of being a band: “we
spend most of our time engaged with the task at hand – rehearsing,
writing, booking tours. We do our best to get along, to stay engaged
with each other and with the shared labour.... Nothing special,
nothing interesting.” The press has talked almost incessantly about
the timing of this release, its relevance to the current moment –
or irrelevance, in the case of those who've complained about the
attention being given to it. That remark by the band prompts a
slightly different reflection, concerning what's changed politically
since the dour days of the first Bush regime's mid-term – what
possibilities have appeared, in Cairo, Tunis, Wisconsin, New York,
London – and what continuities, what lack of progress, what causes
for despair, still exist. It seems apposite to note how strange it
is, this hard-won document of anger and lovely stasis and ghostly
drift, just as popular struggle, at least in Britain and the
post-Occupy US, seems to be undergoing its own moment of hiatus, when
that arduous thought, of the “shared labour” of ordinary
collectivity, of the contradiction and difficulty out of which
cultural politics grows, seems the most counterfactual, and the most
important. The album's meanings begin but don't end here, any more
than the struggle itself does. But we can start by saying: listen;
it's worth it.
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