Godspeed You Black Emperor!
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven
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Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, the second full length album by Montreal’s reclusive nine member outfit Godspeed You Black Emperor!, is anything but an easy listen. With its four "songs" running over 87 minutes, this double album requires serious devotion in terms of both patience and time. However, by no means is this necessarily a negative trait, for Godspeed seems to want it to be exactly that way. They do not make sounds for the background, something nice to fill the silence; on the contrary, when successful, Godspeed’s epic compositions grip the listener by almost forcefully closing his eyes, making him pay attention, and sweeping him away.

Nonetheless, another element of Godspeed is utterly frustrating and enigmatic: their "message." Eschewing lyrics and singing of any kind, past recordings, 1998’s f#a#oo LP and 1999’s Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP, are littered with anti-government and apocalyptic spoken word rants, and liner notes mention freedom, hope, and the despicability of cops. However, one never gets a clear idea of what exactly they mean to say or propose or even how seriously it should all be taken.

This frustration of ideas evinces itself in Godspeed’s catalog of music as well. Each "song" is divided into a number of thematically separate sections, making for a few very long tracks, which can come across as quite disjointed and incongruous at times. Within these extended pieces, strange and unfocused slabs of ambient noise and tape loops are juxtaposed against massive, striking compositions that typically build slowly from a simple violin or guitar melody into a tremendous climax in which an army of delay-laden guitars, rich enveloping basses, thundering percussion, and screaming strings jostle for space. These climaxes, at once beautiful and chaotic, are exactly what have come to define Godspeed and distinguish them from contemporaries like Dirty Three and Mogwai, while still maintaining that sense of perplexity.

Lift Your Skinny Fists expands on these traits quite logically; it is louder, more ambitious, and more fully realized than Godspeed’s previous two releases. Additionally, the influence of Sonic Youth, Kronos Quartet, The Velvet Underground, and even straightforward punk rock is still there; hence, Godspeed has not drastically deviated from what has worked in the past.

Lift Your Skinny Fists opens with "Storm," a twenty-two minute opener styled in vintage Godspeed fashion. A melancholy violin fades in, grows louder and louder until the rest of the band storms in with an enormous collision of dueling guitars, violins, and cellos that maintains an incessantly catchy melody and takes some surprising twists of dynamics, propelled primarily by the incredibly powerful drumming. This portion of "Storm" is simply amazing, conjuring vast sonic vistas of magnificence and frenzy and is completely compelling throughout. Unfortunately, the remainder of “Storm” is an uneventful combination of monotonous piano and buzzing noise, with some incoherent shrieking in the distant background.

"Static," the second lengthy piece, aimlessly plods through a mess of random noise, including a pointless spoken word bit from a super market intercom, before finally getting into an actual piece by the entire band, the first of which contains a pretty violin line perverted by a preacher’s drivel. Only with the second to last segment does "Static" redeem itself as Godspeed menacingly string together a piece that is at once haunting and intense and simultaneously reach their absolute loudest and fastest point on record to date. The bass thumps through a violent sea of subversive strings, screeching guitars, and pulsating drums, gradually building toward a perfect cathartic climax. Once again, such an excellent achievement in sound is followed by utterly worthless din, further emphasizing the unnecessary irregularities of "Static."

Fortunately, such inconsistencies of "Static" are quickly forgotten with "Sleep," Godspeed’s best and most focused composition to date. An elderly man’s touching reminiscence of Coney Island gives way to chiming guitars blending in and out of each other and flowing throughout the rhythm and string sections. There is not a mere build up and subsequent climax either: "Sleep" takes a complicated and unpredictable yet wholly compelling path to its denouement, without straying into needless experimentation. In relation to the Coney Island story, the piece seems to capture sonically the fond nostalgia, sad remembrance, and consequent conflict the old man feels; projected to the listener, it is hard to believe that someone could not relate and be moved by Godspeed’s musical translation of such emotions.

The finale, "Antennas," opens with three aggravatingly disconnected segments: an annoying, sparse, and totally out of place fragment of sampled bluegrass, a brief "glockenspiel duet," and a group of French girls singing "Mon Ami." The point of these three together is obscure and immediately disregarded when Godspeed breaks into the fourth part of the song. Inverting their traditional structure, a panicked eruption of Godspeed’s entire instrumental ensemble spews out vivid sentiments of melancholy and then slides away into some of their most sorrowful guitar licks put to tape, all of which is backed by equally mournful drums and strings. However, such brilliance is followed by more barren noise-scapes that end the album in unspectacular fashion.

At their finest, Godspeed have an astounding knack for wrenching an uncanny amount of emotion out of each instrument, each chord change, and few rival them at their best in terms of pure visceral impact on the listener. However, Lift Your Skinny Fists contains quite a bit of extraneous material that must be sifted through in order to attain what is so remarkably special. Herein lies further proof of the frustrating contradiction of Godspeed, which has also been present on each of their previous releases. They have an ungodly amount of talent and are arguably one of the finest live acts around. However, until they filter their recordings down to what they do spectacularly well, they will not have achieved their maximum potential on record. Nonetheless, Lift Your Skinny Fists, in spite of its contradictory flaws, is still in essence a unique adventure into the possibilities of emotional expression through sound, which is bound to both entertain and challenge.

Check out Godspeed's web site at www.southern.com/southern/band/GDSPD/

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