Godspeed You! Black Emperor

"We've never lectured or insisted that everyone should believe the same things that we do; instead we've pleaded and pleaded and pleaded -- we've thrown these records into the ocean like so many hopeless transmissions, praying and hoping that some people would get the point, the simple simple simple point; that the world we live in is lost, violent, and obscene; that the relations we have with each other and ourselves are mostly alienated, that together we need to begin figuring out how to fix ourselves, our communities, our world."
- Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Many, many words have been written about Godspeed You! Black Emperor; so many in fact that it seems somehow redundant to write yet another article or review. In researching the band online, we compiled over 400 pages of commentary on the band and its work. So, instead of restating what has already been written over and over, we will simply offer a compilation of existing plagiarized text with a corresponding link to its source, whereby the reader can peruse a sampling of articles and select their own words of choice for what, in our opinion, is one of the most important bands in the world.

They're the most inclusionary socio-politico indie-rockist cult act since the Nation of Ulysses, but apocalyptic orchestral urban-decay soundtrackists Godspeed You! Black Emperor -- a band so bizarrely artistic that they recently underwent an exclamation-mark-shifting name change, from Godspeed You Black Emperor! -- wouldn't think of themselves as any of those things. Efrim Munuck, the guitarist at the center of Godspeed and the mouthpiece out front of the instrumental combo, is often painted as angry, didactic, and fiercely political, but, in conversation, he turns out to be more affable than affronting, his genial demeanor and dorky French-Canadian accent rendering the GY!BE juggernaut in friendlier shades. After spending his teens in "little go-nowhere pot-headed punk-rock bands," Munuck made a final fuck-you gesture to the process of music-making. Frustrated and fed up, he cut a cassette under the name Godspeed You Black Emperor!, with the mindset that it would be the last musical stuff he ever did. Three years later, however, with Munuck having long given up music, he was invited to open a show on the strength of such a tape. A couple carefully placed phone calls to longtime friends Moro and Moya later, Godspeed were born. Again.
- read article in Neumu

What Godspeed You! Black Emperor actually present to its listeners are dense, epic instrumental compositions, which tend to start small and stark and build inexorably towards intense climaxes, swaying and bending as they go under the weight of so much accumulated instrumentation. Strings, in varying shapes, sizes, and degrees of distress, are their pieces' most dominant element. These include guitars which rarely sound like guitars -- some bathed in layers of feedback and fuzz, some prepared and painful sounding, almost all broodingly dolorous -- as well as achingly pretty cello, viola, and violin parts which often sound almost as if they'd been plucked from some forgotten backwoods folk tune. Complementing all this stringed noise are brassy waterfalls of French horn, repetitive organ and synth parts, heavily processed machine noise, found sounds, and a lot more. As the pieces build from delicate sound poetry to frenzied eruptions, martial percussion rhythms -- often featuring glockenspiel, chimes, and nontraditional percussive instruments in addition to the drum kit -- emerge, underpinning the rest of the instrumental mix. It all adds up to varying degrees of incredibly nuanced, repetitious hum, the sound of an alien life force, its heartbeat and breathing, expressed through music.
- read article in Epitonic

"I don't think we ever intended to put out a record and we certainly never intended to put out a record that people actually listen to and we never intended to be a band that would play all the time. It was never supposed to be any of those things and the trap when you start playing all the time, you end up not listening to what other people are playing. You just focus more and more on what you're playing, what your defined parts are and you play those parts but you don't listen anymore. That's a real problem. Once we were on tour and playing all the time we ended up basically playing the same parts most of the time and listening less to what other people would play."
- Interview with David Bryant of Godspeed

"When we started up again, really the only founding idea that we had was that we didn't want to waste our time trying to learn songs that were verse/chorus/verse; we wanted to avoid all the things that frustrated us about playing in other bands," he offers, as explanation to their early ideals. "We were really committed to the idea of this being instinctive, and just doing stuff that makes sense to us, and not trying to, y'know, self-justify, or justify to anyone else why we do what we do. But, at the same time, we're not interested in being self-indulgent, so we try to self-edit, and we try to think a bit about what we're trying to say to people. Other than the most recent record, we've always been super-instinctive. Our second EP was called Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada, and people ask us all the time what that means. And I couldn't tell you. I just know it makes sense to us."
- read article in Neumu

This music is by turns harrowing, mordant, violent, indulgent, delicate, and unspeakably beautiful. Though Godspeed clearly owes allegiance to a handful of great innovators -- Lamonte Young, John Cale, Glenn Branca, and Sonic Youth among them -- there's never been anything quite like their ambient orchestral dirges. The group, an amorphous, enigmatic entity of uncertain, fluctuating membership, never even intended to seek success as a rock ensemble, forming in 1994 as a multimedia film and music ensemble and self-releasing a limited 33-cassette release of their first recording, All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling. Three years later they released F#A# Infinity on the Canadian Constellation Records label. A year after that it was picked up and re-released by Kranky. Meanwhile interest in the band was growing rapidly, thanks to college radio, the band's memorable live performances, considerable critical praise, and a recording session with John Peel. In 1999, the Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP came out simultaneously on Constellation and Kranky, and in 2000, the eagerly awaited double LP Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven followed.
- read article in Epitonic

Godspeed You Black Emperor! first came to the attention of a record buying audience following the 1998 CD reissue of their first album, the cryptically titled f#a# infinity. Following some well received live shows in 1999, the band, who feature no less than nine members, experienced a meteoric and well deserved rise to cult stardom, becoming the unofficial spokespeople for instrumental alt-rock. One of the reasons f#a# infinity was so well received was the way in which it perfectly encapsulated in it's three sprawling tracks an overwhelming sense of doom and despair, something endemic amongst nineties teenagers. From the opening tape recording in "Dead Flag Blues" of a voice lamenting 'a thousand lonely suicides', to the understated drones then the power rock of "During Downpour," through all the peaks and troughs in between, the album remains unequivocally dedicated to documenting the scum-ridden underbelly of Western society. With the Slow Riot for Zero EP they expanded on the theme with two additional tracks, while their second album proper, Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven brought their distinct brand of orchestral doom to an even wider audience.
by Hardeep Phull in Rock Sound, November 2002

Yanqui U.X.O. is the third full-length record from Montreal's 9 piece collective, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Over the course of their last 2 LPs and a 2 song EP, Godspeed have plotted a dramatic and slow building course with guitars that sound like strings, and strings that sound like rockets. Two bass players and two full trap kit players add a cinematic propulsion that ultimately explodes into sheets of noise that rest into ambient catharsis. Their instrumentals are often punctured by AM radio diatribes of life in late period capitalism. The packaging of their records, which has included everything from passages in Hebrew to the new LPs image of bombs dropping from an airplanes point of view, has added to the music's overall apocalyptic tone. Visibly absent from the new LP are any tape recordings or ambient tracks at all, which points to a band looking to turn over a new leaf, or maybe just questioning its own hermetic track record.

The stark passages of weeping strings and guitars are still present, as are the triumphant drum marches. Some lovely moments do emerge that sound like nothing the band has done before though, and the addition of some of Chicago's finest jazz players adds a refreshing tone (the record was recorded in Chicago at Electric Audio). New drum rhythms and guitar textures seem to occasionally emerge as well. However, ultimately, all passages lead to orgasmic cacophonous explosions, which can get a bit tedious over the course of a whole LP. If Yanqui U.X.O. is what I think it is though, a portrait of a band in transition, (and given this band's history) then we only have the future to look forward to.

You'll also notice the group's increased reliance upon strings. They add texture to "09-15-00"'s knife-edged build, and counterpoint during the climax, and they're also crucial to "motherfucker=redeemer"'s initial sense of urgency. It's in "rockets fall on Rocket Falls", however, that they truly make their mark. The piece front-loads its climax, devolving from a hopeless dash to a nightmare ballet; close your eyes and imagine a last-minute rush to stop nuclear armageddon...that fails. There's a moment of calm before the catastrophe, and then the bombs begin to fall in slow motion. Then comes the death knell -- a plodding brass, wind and string dirge that's half Bernard Herrmann, half one of the scarier bits of Holst's The Planets. There's a climactic build as explosions mount, a hint of hope in the final minute, a plaintive, ghostly coda, and then the fires go out. Don't be surprised if you're shivering when it ends.

Thanks to Albini's recording acumen, you'll hear every electrified chord, every seething scrape of the bow, every lonely plink of the piano (especially during "motherfucker=redeemer") and every rich, cascading flurry of drumbeats and cymbal crashes. Nothing is muddy, nothing is buried, nothing is superfluous. Indeed, it's looking as if the band's gratuitous shift of their name's already-unnecessary exclamation point is the only frivolous thing about Yanqui U.X.O. -- the name itself an impressive burst of brevity, given the band's demonstrated fondness for lengthy and cryptic album titles.

The titular conceit, which addresses the unexploded ordnance (both literal and metaphorical) of post-millennial corporate culture, is an interesting reversal of the current spate of US anti-drug commercials that link drug traffic to terrorism; by giving your money to multinational entertainment corporations, GY!BE argues, you're actually funding high-tech weapons development. They even provide a handy diagram explaining the idea (which, due to ever-reliable "internet research", they got wrong (a single, relatively extraneous element. cst ed.), necessitating a second run of artwork). Of course, nothing in the music directly addresses this point, but regardless of the validity or importance of their argument, Godspeed scores a few maturity points for admitting their own culpability -- they confess that they've profited from chain-store sales, and are therefore a tiny part of the problem. (Of course, the fact is, every time you give money to, say, an American charity, some portion of that money goes to that charity's employees' salaries, which are taxed, and some portion of those taxes finds its way into the military budget...so really, everyone's culpable and everyone's screwed.)

The band should be proud of Yanqui U.X.O. -- it proves that they're not hopelessly married to the fine-print details of their formula, and that they can still wring fresh ideas from familiar territory.
- The Edge (UK) November 1, 2002



monologues - the dead flag blues (intro)

this monologue appears at the beginning of the dead flag blues from the album f#a#oo; it's read by lee marvin and comes from incomplete movie about jail, an unfinished film that efrim wrote and has been working on for the last five years.


the car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
and a dark wind blows
the government is corrupt
and we're on so many drugs
with the radio on and the curtains drawn

we're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
and the machine is bleeding to death

the sun has fallen down
and the billboards are all leering
and the flags are all dead
at the top of their poles

it went something like this:

the buildings tumbled in on themselves
mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble
and pulled out their hair

the skyline was beautiful on fire
all twisted metal stretching upwards
everything washed in a thin orange haze

i said: "kiss me, you're beautiful -
these are truly the last days"
you grabbed my hand and we fell into it
like a daydream or a fever

we woke up one morning and fell a little further down -
for sure it's the valley of death
i open up my wallet
and it's full of blood