Godspeed You Black Emperor!
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven
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Godspeed You Black Emperor!
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven
Kranky, 2000
RiYL: Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, Labradford, Stars Of The Lid |
"Storm" is basically a revised version of that album's "Moya": a baroque adagio for chamber strings leads to a driving, pounding crescendo that dies out and then returns as a majestic psychedelic progression. This in turn mutates into a martial frenzy that resembles Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies.
The ensemble's skills in concocting and assembling subliminal noises shine in "Static," an electronic suite that is the antithesis of "ambient" but for several minutes flirts with the format, only to turn into a spoken opera and then into more cello-paced chamber music and then into louder, hard-rocking psychedelic outburst. "Sleep" is a slow burner that eventually builds up yet another martial crescendo which collapses into yet another cacophony.
The band's method suffers from at least two problems. To begin with, the spoken segments serve no purpose and detract from the overall project. More importantly, the dual attack of rock'n'roll and free-form noise loses some of its impact because the two formats are never "fused," only appended one to the other.
Indeed, the music here is far less creative and original than Rachel's chamber rock'n'roll. Overall, this ambient/noise/psychedelic amalgam is limited by tedious repetition and a lack of emotional focus. The band's potential shows only in the last, and more experimental, piece. "Antennas To Heaven" opens with the sampling of a folk song and then offers subtle noise collages. After a long journey through altered states of the mind, a tender melody rises from the ashes of harmony. This, at last, is a real moment of genius.
PIERO SCARUFFI | Piero Scaruffi runs the exhaustive music database Scaruffi.com. A native of Italy, he has also been praised for his work on the General Theory of Relativity, formal theories of the mind, and artificial intelligence. And no, we aren't making that up.