Godspeed You! Black Emperor – No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead

Constellation

We know what No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead refers to, but we also know that it doesn’t have to. Yes, it’s the response to that, but though there’s always been clear signifiers in Godspeed You! Black Emperor releases (including references to Palestine) and even clearer references in their actions, the music has often taken a less dogmatic approach, swapping ‘mere’ words for rhythmic sweep and crescendo, finding emotional aggregates and passion in the interleaving of string and guitar.

Words will never be enough and Godspeed have always understood this. There may be conceptual and political similarities to bands like Crass, but these are very different times and unleashing a word horde is not going to cut it.

It’s perhaps telling that, thirty-odd years ago, Godspeed found themselves a thoroughly political band in the midst of a post-rock movement that seemed intent on obliteration and bliss. Some of those post-rock, post-shoegaze, post-everything bands might have been attempting to wrestle with our political consciousness, but they were doing it very obliquely. Godspeed were always explicit in other ways (as were Mogwai), but mostly the music seemed designed to be timeless and, this feels wrong to say, but sort of edgeless.

It waxed, it waned, it sort of raged, it often despaired. The thing I always love(d) about their music was that it seemed like a heartfelt diatribe heaved out of a weary throat and then stripped back and filtered so that the words dissolved into the buzz of strings or the thud of drums. Those strings are stretched hair, those drums are skin; you just need to lean in a little closer.

The title itself is something worthy of analysis. It’ll be in textbooks on media theory, pored over (and into) by mini-McLuhans. I got this via a promo from the label and I thought initially it was just a stopgap. Later I saw a post by Sly And The Family Stone that recognised the similar absurdity of a world somewhere going to pure hell and somewhere else, groups of people having to answer the question: “What shall we call this? What might sell? Who might buy this? Who might it appeal to?”

I’m not even hinting at hypocrisy here, because there is none: Art is necessary here because of suffering there. Art will be necessary there too, is perhaps still necessary. The title reduces tragedy to numbers, to STEM analysis, and the music sometimes echoes that exasperation, as in “Babys In A Thundercloud”, which rumbles with ominous storm clouds even as Hurricane Milton heads to its own eschatology. It’s perhaps “Babys” that sounds most like a GY!BE track, though it’s still hard to imagine anyone else doing this stuff, even though there’s been decades of copyists with their notebooks out.

Of course, the quiet-loud dynamics are what we come for; but there is something admirably restrained about much of this album, especially when you suspect that the emotions behind it are complex and distracting. “Sun Is A Hole Sun Is Vapors” is like a post-rock pop song which packs a great deal of quiet frenzy into barely five minutes time. Similarly, the closing track “Grey Rubble – Green Shoots” is slight by their standards, though packs a different kind of emotional punch in that it leaves us with a rather literal representation of hope amongst the ruins.

There’s brutality here – “Raindrops Cast In Lead” builds into some kind of nightmare firestorm with guitars wailing and the bass trying to hold them down, while “Broken Spires At Dead Kapital” is one of the bleakest things they’ve done and feels like a soundtrack to a more severe, Super 8 version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

I can imagine that a lot of the more fervent Godspeed fans will have been waiting for this response. I’m a fan but I don’t think I’ve got all the albums and I haven’t tracked down the rarities and I don’t think I could be considered a super-fan; but even I wondered casually what the next Godspeed album might be like, given the fucking world right now. You can only feel that must be somewhat of a burden for them, which is why I love the fact that “Grey Rubble” prioritises the beautiful violin over the crunching drums; it would have been so easy for them to only blister their way through this difficult album with pace and energy and rage.

They address depravity head-on and offer something other than desperation, and this nuanced take is something valuable in itself, if only because it makes vulnerability and uncertainty central to our humanity. We should all be glad that they’re back.

-Loki-