Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Albums Collection 1998-2015 (7CD) [Upgrade]

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The instrumental multimedia Montreal group Godspeed You! Black Emperor create extended, repetition-oriented chamber rock. The minimal and patient builds-to-crescendo of the group's compositions results in a meditative and hypnotic listen that becomes almost narrative when combined with found-sound splices and the films of their visual collaborators.

GY!BE formed in 1994, and that year self-released a limited-run (33 copies) cassette entitled All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling. The band's next recording, F#A#(Infinity), was initially a limited-run release of 550 LPs on the Canadian label Constellation, but was picked up by Kranky and released on CD as well. Early 1999 brought the EP Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada (released by both labels) and increased recognition for a band intent on retaining anonymity. Nevertheless, interest in GY!BE only continued to grow among new music fans, with much positive attention from The Wire magazine, the band's participation in the John Peel-produced Peel Session for the London BBC, and the group's consistently impressive live shows, including their performance at Quebec's 1999 new music festival FIMAV and a tour with Labradford later that year.

GY!BE performances generally include at least nine or more musicians and a projectionist. The instrumentation consists of three guitars, two basses, French horn, violin, viola, cello, and percussion. The year 2000 brought about the release of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, pushing their diverse orchestral rock sound even further into the universe. Yanqui U.X.O. followed in 2002. GY!BE remained in absentia until they reassembled for a tour in 2010. Another tour commenced in September of 2012 with stops at both the Pitchfork and All Tomorrow's Parties festivals of that year. In October, GY!BE announced 'ALLELUJAH! DON'T BEND! ASCEND!, their first recording in a decade, a mere two weeks before it was released. Drummer Tim Herzog replaced Bruce Cawdron around this time and GY!BE played sporadically for much of the next two years as they worked on their sixth album between late 2013 and 2014. Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress was recorded in Montreal and North Carolina; it marked the band's first single LP-length release since 1999. Recorded and mixed by Greg Norman, it was issued in the spring of 2015.

Joslyn Layne, Allmusic.com

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You know those moments you get when you hear a great song for the first time? There's always that one part that you just connect with so well that you can't get enough of listening to it. Godspeed You Black Emperor's debut album is, to some extent, like that the whole way through.

The disc opens with a low-pitched, dull drone and a clear, deep voice speaks: "The car is on fire. And there's no driver at the wheel. And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides…" The man goes on, the centerpiece in a recorded interpretation of post-apocalyptic stillness. "It went like this. The buildings tumbled in on themselves. Mothers clutching babies. Dug through the rubble. And pulled out their hair." A violin in the background plays for the dead.

20 people were involved in the making of this album, whose three tracks span the course of three years (1995-1998). As a collective, they've recorded some of the most harrowing soundscapes you may (or may not) ever listen to. And of all avant-garde's minimalist, found-sound experimentalists, this group is one of the few that hasn't left out beauty and emotion in their pieces. We'll see what the future brings for Godspeed You Black Emperor! Let's just hope it's not a "skyline beautiful on fire… twisted metal stretching upwards."

Ryan Schreiber, Pitchfork.com

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A low hum is the first thing heard. It's nearly an inaudible sound, like the opening of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Soon other instruments join and overlap: strings, guitar, and glockenspiel. For a while, the listener hovers in a mist feeling the musical waves ebb and flow, warning of impending danger. In these moments, uncertainty breeds and devours the weak, swallowing them whole. This is probably Mile End, the location alluded to in the liner notes of the Canadian ensemble Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. Mile End is described in detail, and the influence of this locale on the recording of the Slow Riot must have been immense. In fact, the best way to describe this album is as a direct result of Mile End's setting: the abandoned buildings, haunting forest, burned out railroad cars, and empty train tracks. All of these physical images pervade the tone of this album: they are its sadness, beauty, and anger. The darkness is there too. Once immersed in Mile End, it's near impossible to find your way out. The darkness limits your freedom, and at the same time hides you from the rest of the world. You are alone and it is both frightening and liberating. As for the music, there's really not much to say. If this description of Mile End appeals to you or intrigues you then it will be a worthwhile listen. "Moya," the album's first piece, is a lot like weathering a torrential downpour: torn between moments of uncertainty a final deluge occurs absorbing everything in its path. The second piece, "BBF3," is a history lesson set to music, a story of dysfunctional government, militias, and human rights. This one album spans the emotions of terror and delight in 30 minutes. The same feelings of fear and triumph found in Beethoven can be found here, and there is perhaps no better endorsement for such music.

Marc Gilman, Allmusic.com

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Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, the much-anticipated follow-up to Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Slow Riot, is a double-disc achievement of four works (each with multiple parts): "Storm," "Static," "Sleep," and "Antennas to Heaven." It is a windfall for any fan of ambient pop, orchestral rock, space rock, or simply lush string arrangements who understands how powerful love, melancholy, and frustration can be. The main complaint voiced by critics of Godspeed's music is that their works just repeat the same pattern: start out sparse and slow, build-build-build, crescendo. While there are certainly crescendos, there is no such predictable pattern repeated among the works on Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven – it's loaded with dynamics, unexpected sections, strong emotions and beauty.

The album opener, "Storm," is a leap for GY!BE that, alone, makes this release worth getting. It's a rapturous work that rises with a potent melancholy, driven by heartrending emotions. "Storm" vents a powerful frustration (each listener can insert their own reasons why) with majestic screams of strings, guitars, and layers, resulting in a climactic and passionate soaring. It eventually winds down into an exhausted aftermath of piano, underlying drones, and frustrated rants. The second piece, "Static," is a wandering, isolationist piece of bleak expanses shaded with darker emotions, but the remaining two works raise the album back up to the impressive standard set by the opening cut, though with less furor and even more loveliness. "Sleep" opens with an elderly gentleman reminiscing about Coney Island, and his frank and amusing narration briefly recalls the recordings of David Greenberger and scenes from the documentary Vernon, FL. This narration is followed by a slow and melodic piece featuring a pseudo-theremin effect amidst all of the other instrumentation. "Antennas to Heaven" opens with someone playing acoustic guitar, singing "What'll We Do with the Baby-O," soon washed over with sound, which then gives way to a brief chorus of glockenspiels, and on.

During most of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, musical and emotional opposites alternate as regularly, and naturally, as breathing: delicate string work and rock-out guitar and drums, spoken word and walls of sound, gracious and possessed, tip-toes and cliff-diving, dark hallways and blinding sunshine.

Joslyn Layne, Allmusic.com

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Montreal politico-art/music terrorist unit Godspeed You! Black Emperor has been working on the material for Yanqui U.X.O. (unexploded ordnance-landmines) for the past four years. Some of the material predates Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven and even Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. Recorded with Steve Albini, the nonet that is Godspeed has issued its most mysterious recording yet. The sound over these three long cuts, like all of the band's recordings, develops slowly over time and creates layers of dynamic tension that expresses itself in waves and off-kilter, shimmering flows. Usually these elements resolve themselves in earth- and ear-shattering, dissonant intensity that leaves the listener emotionally drained – especially live. But here, a more minimal and – dare I say – quiet approach is used. For over 75 minutes, no "found" voices are wafting through the mix like displaced ghosts at a musical inquiry into the nature of mass control and fascism. The ghosts here are not disembodied or free to roam; they are contained within the vibrational structures and harmonic encounters along the dynamic field itself. There is more melody, not less; there are more sections in each piece, complex parts of compositions that articulate themselves more slowly and pronouncedly. Above all, there is beauty, aching, anguished beauty created by dissonance between electric guitars, keyboards, and a string section propelled by a drum kit that is barely contained within the frame of the music. Tonal extensions of simple melodic structures create new melodic fragments that are incorporated into an already growing mass of tension that is alleviated not by force, but by engaging silence as a compositional and improvisational tool. This is evident in all three tunes, but particularly in the second section of "9-15-00," which begins by stepping out of a void into a fullness of color and texture that eventually raises the tension bar over 22 minutes without resolution. For the second section, spare fragments and chords are placed carefully next to the altar of silence and engage it in dialogue, in contradiction, and in echoing its own concerns at how it is possible in our world, very possible, that at the whim of some fool, all of this – the music; it's haunted, hunted melody; the veritable grain of its voice; along with all life – could enter into the silence forever. A close inspection of the record cover with its photograph of bombs in free-fall and its indicting chart shows concretely how the major record labels are all involved with the creators and purveyors of weapons of mass destruction. This may be melancholy music, but this is a dark time. At least it isn't music of mourning – yet. And for the record, though the critical backlash against Godspeed You! Black Emperor has already begun, this is music for a different kind of engagement; one that sets its own agenda and pushes against its own history.

Thom Jurek, Allmusic.com

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Around the turn of the millennium, Godspeed You! Black Emperor were the right band at the right time. They arrived with their debut album, F#A#∞, in 1997, when the speed of technology was accelerating, genres were being shuffled, and people were thinking about where music might go. Godspeed, a loose and mysterious collective from Canada (guitarist Efrim Menuck seemed like the leader, but they preferred to be received as a unit) with an anarchist political bent who fused Ennio Morricone, minimalism, found sound, and metal-inflected noise, presented one intriguing possibility.

The group stayed busy during its initial run– by 2002, when they released Yanqui U.X.O., they had put out three expansive full-lengths and a long EP– and then they put Godspeed on the shelf and went away for a while. If they'd never gotten back together and had never released another note of music, it wouldn't have mattered. Their legacy was secure. But Godspeed started playing live again in 2010 and, just as it was when they first came on the scene, they filled a hole in music that we either didn't know existed or had forgotten about. Then, two weeks ago, came the surprise announcement of a new album, Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!, their first in exactly 10 years. Once again, their timing is impeccable. If Godspeed around the turn of the millennium felt like a band of the moment, now, in a time of rapid cultural turnover and bite-sized music consumption, they feel out of step in a very necessary way.

It's tempting to look at Allelujah! through the lens of politics, especially since Godspeed themselves have so often encouraged this viewpoint. When we last heard from them on record, it was a year after 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan was well underway, and the war in Iraq was just around the corner. We were settling into a decade that was, from an American perspective, defined by two wars started by an increasingly unpopular president and an inflating economic bubble that would pop just as he was leaving office. Their music and presentation drew some of its energy from this anxiety. So listening to new music from Godspeed now– during an election season, when the wars and the aftermath of that economy are still being argued every day by two presidential candidates grappling with the legacy of the early 2000s– you can't help but allow the political moment to shape how it's heard.

But the focus on the band's politics obscures something important: Godspeed You! Black Emperor are making art, not writing editorials. And the fact that they are making art gives them leeway to do things that wouldn't work in the context of pure rhetoric. It allows them to find magnificence in destruction and build an aesthetic out of decay and loss. So for all their political slogans, pointed titles, and references to global doom, engagement with Godspeed's music can feel exceedingly personal. When listening to their music, I'm not necessarily thinking about the downtrodden transcending their place in the capitalist hierarchy or the end of the world; I'm thinking about the idea of transcendence, the raw grace of noise, and the tragedy of endings. Godspeed's music works so brilliantly because it can be abstracted and scaled, blown up into an edifice that towers over a continent or shrunk down to something that feels at home in a bedroom. So mapping the contours of their grand music onto your own ordinary life can feel both natural and inspiring.

The two lengthy tracks on Allelujah!, "Mladic" and "We Drift Like Worried Fire", have been part of the band's live repertoire since 2003. So the record feels in one sense like Godspeed taking care of unfinished business, presenting existing music from their influential run in a context that showcases its full force and power. Taken together, those tracks serve as a 40-minute summary of everything that made this band great. "Mladic" is all gloom and menace, building from an opening vocal snippet, adding pings of guitar, strings that saw away in a Middle Eastern mode, and dark clouds of feedback. This is the Godspeed that learned so much from the pummeling repetition of Swans and the fiendish drama of metal. There's not exactly hope in a track like "Mladic", but there is a kind of darkly shaded catharsis. Godspeed have never sounded quite this heavy, and it's especially impressive in how far it can veer from the themes that hold it together without losing the thread.

"We Drift Like Worried Fire" is the flip-side of "Mladic", both literally and figuratively. For all their grim black-and-white roadside imagery and scenes of destruction, it can be easy to overlook just how joyful Godspeed's music can be. Built around a simple guitar motif consisting of just a few notes, "Worried Fire" is one of those accruing pieces that gathers one element after another for 10 minutes until it's so gorgeous you almost can't take it. And at exactly that moment, Godspeed pause and then push the music over the top with an explosion of guitar that snaps everything that came before into focus. "Worried Fire" is music that makes you forget about politics and the machinations of the record business and the bullshit of internet chatter and brings you into singularity with the sheer beauty of their sound, music to make you cry with a smile on your face. When it's playing, the rest of the world goes away for 20 minutes.

"Worried Fire" is also the kind of song that Godspeed's early peers (Mogwai, Dirty Three) as well as the bands that followed (Explosions in the Sky, Mono) write with some regularity, but they never quite hit these heights. Godspeed have always been about more than volume, more than just addition and subtraction. And if Yanqui found them getting a little too close to their descendants, Allelujah! makes clear that Godspeed will always own this sound. Few can match their feel for arrangement or sense of structure. And the two shorter tracks on this album, "Their Helicopters' Sing" and "Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable", are evidence of their infallible ear for texture. They're both rich, dense drones, "Helicopter" an especially thick mix of feedback and accordion while "Strung Like Lights" is airier and more unstable, not unlike the locked groove that came at the second side of their debut F#A#∞.

In one of the many inserts that came with the vinyl version of that debut, there's a diagram that takes the form of an architectural blueprint. It's called "Faulty Schematics of Ruined Machine [to Scale]" and it contains a drawing with four axes marked as Fear, Hope, Desire, and Regret and text describing elements of the diagram in cryptic and desperate language. One paragraph highlights a drawing of a tape loop connected between a distant satellite and a broken tape machine, a loop "so long it was rocketed thru atmosphere by wigged-out Soviet Cosmonaut… it will take three lifetimes to hear in its entirety." Godspeed use tape loops, both live and on record, and the key visual element of their shows involves the projection of 16mm film loops by collective member Karl Lemieux. For this band, there's always been something appealing about repeating cycles and rituals– sounds and images that vanish over the horizon and then come back around again, like the trains that roll by their practice space at Hotel 2 Tango. Planets orbit, people are born and die, and music has a moment and then vanishes before returning again. And so it goes with Allelujah!, an album of music that is both new and old from a band that we thought we might never hear from again, one we should appreciate while we can.

Mark Richardson, Pitchfork.com (9.3/10)

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The four pieces that make up the suite-like Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, have evolved from an earlier live incarnation of the work, known to fans as "Behemoth," which was excessive even by Godspeed You! Black Emperor's sprawling standards. For the studio, they've carved it and sharpened it for maximum impact. At just over 40 minutes, this is the band's first single album release since their 1998 debut F# A# (Infinity). It is also their first ever without the use of sampled or field-recorded voices. Opener "Peasantry or Light! Inside of Light!" thunders in on doom riffs, while squalling, sawing, multi-tracked violins and an army of slow, plodding guitars compete for dominance, with thudding drums – à la Black Sabbath – and a taut, layered bassline all playing variations on 12-bar blues but in waltz time. Short cadenzas are woven into the turnarounds, throwing things off and adding a regal element that passes for a schematic; it's almost florid maximalism, but the tension is palpable. After a stinging guitar break, Sophie Trudeau's violins introduce the next phase as Eastern and Western melodies join and soar to the top of the mix and the rest of the band's instruments, puncturing every space in order to catch her. That enormous crescendo we've become accustomed to never quite happens. The pace slows, the spaces get wider, and the opening riff eventually returns, this time with the pomp of those recombined harmonic lines woven in. "Lamb's Breath" and "Asunder Sweet" variously employ blown-out distorted basslines, piercing feedback, single guitar stabs, and sonic washes, culminating in tonal and microtonal drones forming the middle of the record. It's an extended meditation in sound, full of bleak and brooding dread and mournful spaces. Ambient textures from blasted organs and synths and guitar harmonics coalesce toward a squall of maqam violin themes grafted onto post-minimalist repetition. Combined, they create a ground floor for GY!BE to begin to erect their trademark urgent, dramatic tension that gradually announces the concluding "Piss Crowns Are Trebled." Single-string ringing guitar, prodded by open-tuned drones from keyboards and other six strings, whomping bass, and cataclysmic drumming are woven into and through one another as an uncharacteristically intricate violin melody climbs toward the transcendent border of no return. Everything swirls in cacophonous, ever repeating, four-beat drones; only Trudeau's violins offer variation in a frenzied, harmonic counterpoint. There is nowhere left for the music to go; even scaling back the swell of instruments doesn't succeed in relieving the tension or stop the frenetic energy; the music has entered oblivion; shelter from the storm is only unnecessary because it is impossible. The conclusion of Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress is, as musically foretold on F# A# (Infinity) in 1998, the undoing of a world. The process of evolution is destruction. In GY!BE's musical universe, everything has already passed over the margin and returned to the void from whence it came. What can be left but silence?

Thom Jurek, Allmusic.com