Godspeed You! Black Emperor are a very self-contradictory band. They draw you in and push you away at the same time. The arcane press releases, the obtuse packaging, all designed to confuse as much as entertain or educate. That exclamation mark in that unwieldy name. Everything about them says “difficult”. But then you bung them on and and they couldn’t be any easier to actually listen to.
There are rules, but it’s not on us to figure them out. The band do that for us. They set each other puzzles, and then resolve them over the course of a track. They don’t always stick the landing — and G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! (clearly someone’s been having fun in one of those “ruin a band name by removing a letter” Twitter threads) has its fair share of aimlessness and blind alleys, but when they do… oh, when they do, there’s not a band out there who can touch them.
I remember ages ago reading about the writing process for Breaking Bad –– the writers would essentially set up situations for each other, and then try to get out of them. With stellar writers, this is what made the show so compelling, as the tension racked up as the traps and puzzles got more intricate. When they’re firing on all cylinders, such as on opener “Military Alphabet (Five Eyes All Blind)” – presumably a reference to the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance — Godspeed provide a similar feeling. Just as you’re thinking “how are they gonna get out of this admittedly not unpleasant noodling”, the riff comes along, and suddenly, like all the best puzzles, the answer seems obvious in hindsight. And then they parade it aloft like a trophy, the riffs getting riffier, the harmonies more complex, and the Apocalypse got a little bit brighter.
Like Swans, they often feel like they’ve just opened a tap to another dimension where the music is always playing; has always been playing, and let it spill out. Is it really the state that’s ending, or just the current state of THINGS? In the press release they call for prison abolition, defunding the police, taxing the rich “until they’re impoverished”. In this particular apocalypse, Godspeed are very much on the side of the angels.
Everyone has their own favourite Godspeed album, and this isn’t mine (that would be Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada at the time of writing, though as always it’s subject to change), but it could be yours. And even when it occasionally feels like it’s labouring under the weight of its own cleverness, it never rubs that cleverness in your face. There’s precious little of the smugness that sometimes leaks into and out of prog, math or jazz. It’s not music that mocks you because it’s cleverer than you, nor does it condescend. It presents you with a thing, and doesn’t challenge you to deconstruct it or figure it out — that’s for the band to do. All it requires of you is to FEEL it. And there’s a lot to feel. And that’s a beautiful thing in itself.
