Godspeed You! Black Emperor - NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD

Godspeed You! Black Emperor – NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD

★★★★

Released October 4th, 2024 on Constellation Records

Godspeed You! Black Emperor are a political band without ever once being a directly political band. The politics are always in the imagery – they are an implied political band. Once upon a time you could figure out what they were on about through the clips they would pepper in at the beginning and end of their big suite movements – the street preacher, the guy reminiscing about Coney Island, the recorded grocery store announcement. Those days are long past. Where once there were multi-part moving suites that regularly went over twenty minutes, there are now six individual movements, only three of which make it over ten minutes. It’s a more concise, professional crescendo-core experience, and it’s one in which the band’s main thrust is only visible in glimmers. The brightest glimmer, of course, is the title, which counts the number of dead in Gaza as of the time of the music’s recording. That Godspeed You! Black Emperor would weigh in on the ongoing genocide was never in doubt; the Montreal collective have always taken a staunch anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist stance. I have to assume that there’s more to it on the physical album, though, or at the live show. I plan on buying one at the other, so I’ll know more in November.

As it stands, the title is a stance and the rest of the album is more of the typical drone-rising action-crest-recede formula that the band has been trading in since the 20th Century and has been busily refining since coming back in 2012 with ‘Allejujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! That’s not to say that adhering to the formula is a bad thing, necessarily. In a setting like post-rock, where the idea is to clear away what has come before to make room for new, it can be daunting to consider the options. The only rational response to total freedom is paralysis; when you can make any decision, you can in the end make none. So having the scaffolding structure that Godspeed You! Black Emperor have built over the past 25 or so years is handy, but in the same vein there is the sense of limitation embedded in it, a sense of vague loss, the kind where you don’t know what exactly you lost but there is a hole nonetheless.

Of these six movements, two are more functional than anything else. The opening track, “SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS”, sets the scene and provides a sort of gentle introduction to the remainder of the album over just under seven minutes. It reminds me of a song I don’t remember the name of that I cut apart for samples several years ago. The vibe is a chill morning, open fields cast with rocks, a grey sky that is still bright for its overcast quality. When it’s over there’s a subtle disappointment – is this all there is? – before the next track picks up. The other functional piece is “BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL” (which sounds like they got it from a Godspeed You! Black Emperor title generator), a short three minute drone that serves to separate one thundering outro from a doom-laden intro. As far as Godspeed You! Black Emperor transition drones go, it’s pretty good, although it comes and goes before you can really register it.

What of the big pieces, though, the ones we’ve all come for? “BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD” is the most latter-day GY!BE of the three, continuing the hesitantly hopeful soundscaping that characterizes “SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS” Maybe things can get better, if we just clear away the detritus of our dying civilization it says – maybe Efrim has gotten less dour in his age. “RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD” starts off along this same vein, but then two-thirds of the way through it evolves into this absolute hurricane of pure rock ‘n’ roll frisson, a squall I’ve come to think of as jammed-out Galaxie 500 as played by early A Place To Bury Strangers. The band sounds like they’re having fun. Weird. “PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS” manages to set the record straight, however. Somewhat shorter than the first two, it edges over into doom metal territory, opening with the mournful strings and eerie atmosphere building of a Lift Yr Skinny Fists-era suite before mining out a heavily distorted guitar divebomb for a heavy crescendo. Then, to end it, the “single”, “GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS”, which brings us back to the hopeful vibes that characterized the beginning of the album, and provides some more of those implied politics: from the ruination of the old capitalist order, new growth, a chance for life, positive change.

The collective are a different beast post-hiatus, and there are good and bad aspects of that. As far as their post-hiatus work goes, though, NO TITLE makes a strong case for the group being one of the best active post-rock acts around, and stands well alongside the other entries in their discography. I’m not sure you can make the case that it’s better than AT STATE’S END or the aforementioned ‘Allejujah! but it adds some great movements into their library and doesn’t encounter any stumbling blocks along the way.