Label: Kranky (CD)/Constellation (Vinyl) Format: CDS,12″
Perhaps the criminally overused expression “intense” can be used with justification, just this once, to describe the sound of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The mysterious Canadian nine-piece roll out another of those accelerative weighty soundscapes that we’d always hoped Glenn Branca would produce.
Discipline and a telepathic, egoless sense of control push the multilayered epic “Moya” into peaks and troughs similar in spirit if not style to Can‘s twenty minute “Bel Air”. During the quieter passages field recordings of anti-establishment rugged individualist types confirm the Millennial intentions of this piece. The interviewer remains anonymous letting the subjects reveal themselves. There are no spoon-fed reference points and the question of whether this man is presented as a prophet or a loon is open to question. All we can say for certain is that his poetry is truly dire. Then, again and again the stratified strings and guitar drone rises higher and higher into new pyramids of sacrifice. It’s not a thousand miles removed from the forgotten ’70s band High Tide. The filtered strings of “Blaise Bailey Finnegan III” lead us back via harmonically narcotic chambers and after the longest twenty minutes in history it is all over.
Bigger than the biggest thing ever.
-Iotar-
