Godspeed You! Black Emperor - NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD
To say so much with almost no words.
The only lyrics on the latest album by post-rock legends Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a brief spoken word monologue by a woman in Spanish, in the midst of the 13-minute “RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD”, where she talks about women, from young to old, children, babies, some never born, being martyred before getting to experience a better world - “falling asleep forever, and never seeing the beauty of the sunrise”. However, even these powerful words express just a fraction of the monumental significance behind this album.
The main emotional strength of this album lies within the sheer somber grandiosity of the musical ideas. Three out of the six songs on the record are over 10 minutes long, with two of those over 13 minutes long (including the absolute highlight of the record, “BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD”). With track lengths like these, and with no vocals, the music has to be absolutely captivating for the listener to stay interested. But that is exactly what this project is, enthralling, haunting, something you’re on the edge of your seat for the entire way through. The composition, structuring and arrangements on the album are top-notch throughout. The performances on every instrument are stunning, bringing the band’s artistic vision to life perfectly, helped along even further by the beautiful, intricate production. The music so brilliantly reflects the darkness, horror and despair of death, of destruction, of genocide; reflects how ultimately futile attempts to push back against it all can feel from our perspective; and, crucially, it perfectly reflects that the only thing left to do is attempt to preserve hope. This is arguably best of all reflected in the closer, “GREY RUBBLE - GREEN SHOOTS”, which starts off with a darker, more menacing tone, but then, at a certain point, becomes softer, and more hopeful. As if hinting that, beyond all the ongoing atrocities, there is still a chance of a better future.
Of course, the most important thing about this project ultimately isn’t the music. At the root of all of this is protest - the album’s main topical focus is the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The song titles, just like the music behind them, are all connected to the themes of suffering, death and war in some way; the album’s “lack of title” references the death toll in Gaza at the time the record was presumably in the works. Horrifyingly, in the months that have passed since February 13th, this tally has almost doubled - with a vast amount of the victims being women, children and elderly people.
NO TITLE AS OF 11 OCTOBER 2024 42,126 DEAD. Ceasefire now.
9.2/10