Godspeed You Black Emperor!
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(2000)
Reviewed by Sarah Jones
Welcome to the end of western civilization, or the last 87 minutes and 27 seconds of it, anyway. Canadians Godspeed You Black Emperor! forcefully return with an infinitely expansive offering of epic proportions (literally) – the two disc Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven, the follow up to 99's Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada.
The four songs, best described as, perhaps, orchestral rock indoctrinated by space rock, start out slow and sparse and gradually brew into furious stormy crescendos, often fluctuating back downwards from a storm rent sky to a mere airy drone with complex arrangements of harrowing strings and guitars, rumbling drums, wobbly pianos, twinkling glockenspiels, and roving horns with an infusion of several indistinguishable instruments, and unnerving samples.
A jaded, restless Godspeed wanders across the continent in the dead of night, down vanishing deserted highways while on the periphery trains relentlessly thunder down worn-out tracks, static from the radio fuzzes out of broken speakers, and muffled disembodied voices rattle across the airwaves of the "Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-way." Eventually while pausing in the rain at a gas station, overhead speakers emit a corporate monotoned voice warning customers not to associate with any individuals not clad in the station's uniforms – they're lurking about, and they'll only do you harm. And on Godspeed rolls through ghostly cities of urban decay where an old man recalls the Coney Island of his youth and hauntingly contrasts it with today saying "they don't sleep anymore on the beach...."
The four songs, two on each disc, are finely wrought and average at just over twenty minutes in length, with sections of the songs bearing such foreboding titles as "Terrible Canyons of Static," "Atomic Clock," "World Police and Friendly Fire," "...The Buildings They are Sleeping Now," "Edgy Swingset Acid," "She Dreamt She was a Bulldozer, She Dreamt She was Alone in an Empty Field," and "Deathkamp Drone."
The first track alone makes this record worth buying. The destruction of western civilization never sounded so beautiful.
Other coverage for this album
Opus 2000Reviewed by Jason MoreheadDepending upon how you look at it, the fact that Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s newest album is a double CD will either seem like the only way to adequately contain the depth and power of their music, or a sign that this Canadian nontet has simply become too big for their artistic britches. But I think that anyone who gives this release a good solid listen will wholeheartedly agree with the…Similar sounding releases
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