The Music View

It's a pity that the Jewish idea of hell has fallen out of favor, because it means Benjamin Netinyahu cannot go there.

This coming October 7th marks the two year anniversary of the current "conflict" between the nations of Israel and Palestine. You will note that conflict is in quotes, because to call it a conflict at this point is to put lipstick on a genocidal pig.

It has been something of an open secret that the nation of Israel regards the nation of Palestine with, at best, naked contempt. What is occurring in Gaza is an inhumane colonistic slaughter of a people who simply wish to exist in the land of their birth, who have been systematically disenfranchised and villainized by a colonialist government which has been openly planning to wipe them out for years. Any aid into the area is denied, by blockade or by bomb, because Israel wants not just to kill Hamas, but to pave the way for a full takeover of the Gaza strip and the full expulsion of Palestinians. Not to mention the response of the current American Presidential administration.

(To be clear, because I know some of you are going for this gotcha, I'm neither saying that Israel has no right to defend itself, nor that Israel has no right to exist. If that is only what the nation was doing, I would be perfectly fine. However, the official position of the Israeli government seems to be that the people of Palestine are categorically responsible for the actions of Hamas, and are to be treated as such. This, I cannot abide. Furthermore, Israel has a right to exist, but not in Gaza. Blood and soil is a fundamentally fascist argument, and the Jewish people of Israel, of all nations, should know where that leads.)

So, what side would Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a group of Jewish anarchists, take in this?

The fact that Efrim is signing albums with "Free Palestine!" should tell you everything you need to know.

Sorry to bury the lede and give my own perspective on one more horrific thing in this wurlitzer of a world, but this album is entirely inseparable from the political context in which it exists. Which I think is notable for this band.

Godspeed has always been political, my retrospective on the band's output has, I hope, made that clear. But for all their politics, it has always remained firmly couched in the realm of theory. "What should be" as opposed to, "what is." It is all about leaving our individualist present and moving forward to a collectivist future. When they wade into the torturous waters of the now, they are often talking about the state of things, the effects of things that have been going on for decades, general trends.

This album is so clearly and obviously in the now, and specifically about one thing, that it becomes impossible to ignore. To talk about this album without mentioning the current Israeli Palestinian genocide is equivalent to talking about Pink Floyd‘s The Wall without mentioning the biography of Roger Waters; it is missing the point and obfuscating critical information at best. This album is a direct response, almost a companion, to the latest savage beating that Israel has decided to levy on the Palestinian people, the world's crushing non-response, and the continued strength of an oppressed nation. It is the light that illuminates the entire remainder of the music found across the four sides of this record.

We begin with sun is a hole sun is vapors, a drone piece that quickly builds to much much more. The horrific caverns of reverb drenched sound that begin this piece quickly give way to an almost anthemic build. I'm most immediately reminded of anthem for no state off of Luciferian Towers, but whereas that track is more akin to an ironic national anthem for a state that should never exist, this track is a tribute to a nation that is reduced to rubble, bleeding, but still un-cowed. "Palestine survives in the rubble, they are harder to kill than that", this song seems to say.

Babys in a thundercloud returns to a well that Godspeed has been dipping into since their beginning, field recordings. It is the sound of a battle that likely cannot be won, the odds are so deeply stacked against us, but we have to try. If we don't, the future cannot exist.

Raindrops cast in lead speaks to the fear where, at any time, your life can be destroyed by a missile from god. Beginning with recordings of birdsong or squeaking metal underpinned with a steady drone, a delay-soaked theme cuts through. The rain this song speaks to is not the healing rain, but the destructive rain of missiles in Gaza.

Broken spires at dead kapital is a dirge. A funerary procession for what was. It is one of the bleakest tracks Godspeed has ever produced. It sounds broken, cracked, horrifically distorted; a yawning chasm of double bass, reverb, and guitar feedback from which no light can escape. Add on top of it the horrifically sad violin lines of Sophie Trudeau, and the pitch black double bass harmonies of Thierry Amar, and you have one of the most hopeless sounds we have created as a species. This track is turning a corner to see that your home has been hit by a missile, combing through the wreckage of what once was your life, and finding nothing but broken photographs, splintered support beams, and your mother's blood stained clothes.

While you are weeping, sitting shiva, the rubberneckers arrive. Feeding off of your pain, they capture your tear-stained visage with impersonal eyes of glass, but they do not offer any comfort or aid. This feeling is captured beautifully in pale spectator takes photographs. Their presance is announced by the moaning violin line that ends Broken spires. The main section builds and explodes in a manner that suggests a machine revving up. But beneath this, there is intense anger, a bitterness that will not go away. It's the taste of the dust in your mouth as you have your presuppositions confirmed; they don't care about you. They maybe never have. The only use your colonizers have for you, your only notable feature, is your ability to stop existing. You have been fully unpersoned. There is nothing left to be done.

The final track of this album is perhaps the most evocative of Godspeed's later catalogue. The first part, grey rubble, portrays something like a final stand against the powers that be. The second part, green shoots, is the inevitable healing that takes place afterward, extended into brilliant crescendo by the seventh untitled track on the vinyl release. The moment wherein the shells stop for good and the people can return to their lives, however changed they may be. It is the sound of vegetation growing over old shells, the sound of tanks reclaimed by vines, of a bomb crater becoming a little pool for birds to alight in. The barren ground and the broken people will heal no matter what happens. Even if the people of Palestine are forced into diaspora, an outcome looking increasingly likely by the day, Palestine will live on. They will be healed, and no bomb, barrier, or two bit despot can ever take that away. The extra extension to this track on side D of the record release speaks to this, becoming so loud as to almost be unbearable before cutting out, dumping all the emotion of this album right into your lap.

No Title is incredible. On par with some of Godspeed's best. Emotionally evocative and incredibly well done, this album would be an masterpiece without the overarching concept. With the concept, this album becomes a harrowing yet beautiful tribute to a people who have had more than their fair share of pain and suffering.

There is another aspect to this album. As the world slips deeper and deeper into a new dark age, it can be difficult to know what to do. Here is my recipe. Hold onto hope, lean on each other, we are on our own. For now, I leave you with the final part of the band's message that accompanied this album; treat it as instruction for the next four years.

How could you have seen it? We had been told, over and over again, that the only way we were getting this album was by way of a leak. The band didn't want this on their record, and went out of their way to bury it. This would be fine if the leaks were plentiful, which they were not. Every one was either a fake or a dead end. Users of Reddit will remember the casketjack incident of 2013, a man who claimed to have a tape only to disappear into the ether. The message was clear, we weren't getting it.

Except, of course, we did. Officially, even.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear going into this. Everything that you have heard from the band over the years about this album is true. They have claimed that it isn’t a Godspeed record due to the major diversions it takes from the standard template. However, this is where I deviate. I wouldn’t go quite that far.

This album is still Godspeed, bits and flashes of the band we will come to know appear throughout the album, but it is in a half-formed state. Understandable, the band recorded this on no budget with the understanding that this may be their last chance to record anything, but it holds true regardless.

Still, don’t let this previous paragraph fool you, this is a fundamentally weird album. Weird even by the standards of this band which, if you’ve been paying attention, says quite a bit. It is full of little digressions and field recordings that don’t seem to go anywhere, there are folk ballads sung by Efrim, which might excite fans of the side project Silver Mt. Zion, but the lyrics are often rambling and confused, and the singing and lo-fi nature of the recording tend to garble much of the already garbled songs.

The result is that All Lights begins to feel a little bit less like a true Godspeed album and more like an archival release; something along the lines of the Pet Sounds sessions or the Esher demos; a half-formed release that listens like a blueprint of something more interesting to come. You can hear the beginnings of what would become The Sad Mafioso on tracks like the brief Shot Thru Tubes, their experiments in noise with the intro to Three Three Three and the track Beep, and even some tracks that would be completely irrepresentative of what the band would do, like the shoegazy Diminishing Shine. It’s the kitchen sink approach to album creation that can only come from a bunch of weirdos who never expected to get famous.

In many ways, this album is the home run to Luciferian Tower's bunt. It is a further fleshing out of the concepts found on that album, but with a new layer of desperation and anger that can only come from seeing how the worst parts of our humanity express themselves in a time of crisis.

But in the middle of all of this, something interesting began to happen. For this entire series I have mentioned that Godspeed feels like music for the apocalypse, for the final end of the world. That end, for the first time in the band's career, feels like it could be literally any day. As they put it,

*we fired up the shortwave radios again, for the first time in a long time. *and found that many things had changed. *the apocalypse pastors were still there, but yelling END TIMES NOW where they once yelled "end times soon". *and the transmission-detritus of automated militaries takes up more bandwidth now, *so that a lot of frequencies are just pulses of rising white static, *digital codexes announcing the status of various watching and killing machines. *and the ham-radio dads talk to each other all night long. *about their dying wives and what they ate for lunch and what they'll do with their guns when antifa comes.*

It's difficult to not feel like we've gone over the cliff in many ways. To call it the end times might be a bit hyperbolic, but, as an elder Gen Z-er, writing this in the cab of a truck, making not enough money, in a broken democracy, in a country sliding towards fascism, on a hunk of rock, in a cold, uncaring void, it's not a difficult leap to make. This album captures that angst perfectly, but, for the first time, also introduces a little bit of hope into the Godspeed canon, and not in a backhanded or false way, but in a genuine heartrending way.

It doesn't start out that way, though. A Military Alphabet (Five Eyes All Blind)(4521.0kHz 4109.09kHz)/(Job's Lament / First Of The Last Glaciers / Where We Break How We Shine)(Rockets for Mary) opens the album with, as the title suggests, military radio chatter. The war has come, frankly it never left. It's yet another Middle Eastern melody, the dying scream of the country and culture being bombed quite literally back to the Stone Age. This one sounds as though it is played on an electric violin, more angry than sad. It’s appropriate, for the scream of righteous fury at a world that has gone cold and mean. Godspeed have been exploring militaristic vibes in their music ever since their return, and that theme is only intensified here. As they said, end times now not end times coming. Yes, it’s the Godspeed classic formula, the same formula that we’ve seen throughout this entire series, but dammit it’s a formula for a reason. It just works. Its a similar build up and come down to their earlier material, thoughts of Yanqui and LYSF come to mind, but what’s interesting is what happens after the track ends. Rockets for Mary, the final section, is a recording of someone walking through a grassy field while explosions go off in the distance, sounding less like massive booms than small pops. It’s the demand that you don’t forget that this music has a point to it. For the first time, Godspeed directly comments, not in their literature, but in their music. The following track is revelation.

Fire at Static Valley is an interlude track, but different than the tracks that Godspeed usually puts in this role. Usually Godspeed employs drones in the role of interlude tracks. Not here. This track is one long build, with a melody that slowly burrows its way inside you. If you’ve ever played the game Spec Ops: The Line, then you will be familiar with tracks like this. It’s the soundtrack to smoking desert sands, pockmarked with shells from a war that never ends, because it’s not supposed to. The nightmare of Orwell made manifest; America has always been at war with Iraq. It’s a portentous piece. A piece that seems to look at the carnage of the past two years, and grimly say, “I told you so.” They did tell us, they’ve been telling us since 1997, and yet, we did not listen. It’s too late.

”Government Came" (9980.0kHz 3617.1kHz 4521.0kHz) / Cliffs Gaze / Cliffs' Gaze At Empty Waters' Rise / Ashes To Sea Or Nearer To Thee begins the back half of this album with, in this case, Ham radio chatter. This time, it’s a doomsday prepper, talking about something with the government. “Government came and killed a couple of them” he says. Frankly, given the current state of the world, it’s all the government seems to be doing. The statement is underpinned by an ominous drone. It’s perfect accompaniment to these times. Everybody’s fighting, everybody’s angry, nobody really knows why.

The drone eventually backs off and the bass takes prominence. In some ways, it’s fitting. The melody from the first part, specifically Job’s Lament, returns. This time sounding roughed up, stained by war and blood. Godspeed once again swings the buildup, the track escalating in a way that should be familiar to anybody who is aware of the band at all. Part of the reason I mention that this album is a return to form is the way in which it is structured. It is closer to pre-hiatus Godspeed than we’ve seen from their entire reunion discography. This is the first time I feel like there is a genuine arc to their music since maybe Lift Your Skinny Fists. It’s surprising that it took this long for the band to return to this sound, but then again, for this band to confound us is nothing new. Eventually, a more hopeful melody enters in to the track before the entire thing descends into noise, a final conflict of sorts.

An ascending major scale announces the fact that we’ve made it out the other side. For the first time post-hiatus, Godspeed presents us with a genuine vision of real hope. The idea that all of our fighting is not in vain, that improvement and a better world is still possible. It is incredibly comforting to hear and see. The build accelerates towards the end, getting louder in the way that post-rock tracks tend to do, before it explodes into scintillating sparkles, underpinned by church bells. This feels like the final victory, for the first time in Godspeed’s discography, we’ve finally made it into the light of day.

The vinyl version of this track ends in a locked groove. On f#a#, it was clear enough what this was here for, to represent the infinity in the album’s title. This time, it’s not so clear cut. Is this the idea that conflict is permanent? That we are doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again? Or is this the permanence of the better world we build from the ashes, the glorious state of being that will carry the human race to the end? I ask, I do not know.

Our Side Has To Win (For D.H.) is the final track on this album, and feels like a coda. Despite everything that previous sentence implies, it may be my favorite Godspeed closer ever. I listened to this track on repeat when the album first came out. It feels like a track from a different band, a kinder band, a band that took more from Sigur Ros than Swans. The beauty is unparalleled in the band’s entire discography. It’s a parting promise of hope for people leaving the fantasy world this album creates. It says that maybe, in this world too, the arc will close and the story will end. It dares to hope that maybe, here too, things can be some kind of ok. Someday. Maybe.

That’s what this album is, in a way. Hope for the future despite the darkness. These times have felt like a moment in history where anything could happen, the people are tired and want a change. It’s up to us now how those dice fall. We may be losing at the moment, but we will turn around, and we will win. All we need to do is trust our fellow man, and we can create a glorious new world.

As such, the primary emotion of this LP is anger: white hot, blistering, sharp anger. It is Godspeed saying, “We can no longer afford to be cryptic, so let us be blunt.” I can think of no more blunt a statement than the bullet pointed conclusion of their manifesto.

the “luciferian towers” L.P. was informed by the following grand demands:

+ an end to foreign invasions

+ an end to borders

+ the total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex

+ healthcare, housing, food and water acknowledged as an inalienable human right

+ the expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again

This being said, let’s dissect their musical manifesto and see what exactly this album is like. The band’s own descriptions will be followed by my own.

UNDOING A LUCIFERIAN TOWERS – look at that fucking skyline! big lazy money writ in dull marble obelisks! imagine all those buildings much later on, hollowed out and stripped bare of wires and glass, listen- the wind is whistling through all 3,000 of its burning window-holes!

Borrowing from the tradition of Yanqui UXO, the album begins with a drone. It’s a lighter drone than the black darkness of their earlier efforts, but it is a drone none the less. If anything, this track feels like an overture, the rising curtain to a grand spectacle show. Militaristic drums and violin hymnal melodies explode at the end. All in all, it begins the album well enough.

BOSSES HANG – labor, alienated from the wealth it creates, so that holy cow, most of us live precariously! kicking at it, but barely hanging on! also – the proud illuminations of our shortened lives! also – more of us than them! also – what we need now is shovels, wells, and barricades!

This is part one of the thesis statement for the album. It is a cinematic track, but one that feels more like a short film compared to LYSF’s feature length picture. In it, well, the worker becomes tired, and rises up against his master. It is a revolution of feeling and crescendos. This is the most soundtrack like Godspeed have gotten so far. The track is less coherent and build like than anything else in their discography, but still communicates their intended message well enough.

FAM / FAMINE – how they kill us = absentee landlord, burning high-rise. the loud panics of child-policemen and their exploding trigger-hands. with the dull edge of an arbitrary meritocracy. neglect, cancer maps, drone strike, famine. the forest is burning and soon they’ll hunt us like wolves.

In revolution, especially revolution lead by the left, power rarely is taken all at once or with any degree of long term stability during the revolution. Often, the result of revolt, especially in the short term, is chaos for all involved. This chaos is reflected in this track. It’s easy to see that this track is disorganized and a little bit disjointed. However, given the images that accompany this track, the immediate counter attack from the government that we are attempting to overthrow, it is a fitting one. We are dodging the bullets, retaliating where we can, eking out an existence in the rubble and the burning wreckage of the new order, attempting to find safety in the rubble and the wreckage. And yet, there is hope, the hymnal melody from the Undoing a Luciferian Towers is present here, under all the chaos. This is difficult, but it will not be the grave for the revolution.

ANTHEM FOR NO STATE – kanada, emptied of its minerals and dirty oil. emptied of its trees and water. a crippled thing, drowning in a puddle, covered in ants. the ocean doesn’t give a shit because it knows it’s dying too.

True peace at last, but at what cost. Here, we mourn the passing of our comfortable lives, but at the same time, we look for the world to come. However long it lasts. The effects of capitalism will linger on for a long time, perhaps for the rest of our species’ allotted time on this planet, but it’s OK. We are finally beginning to pay back the debt that has been accrued. There is love at last, there is peace at last, now that the world is out of the hands of the people who broke it. The people come out of their homes, and work to create the new world. The music builds to a thunderous crescendo. It’s hard work, but it is glorious. Finally, we are free to make a decent world.

When I say that this album flows as one giant track, I mean it. The A side of the vinyl record release even has a locked groove so the illusion of being one continuous track is maintained somewhat.

The first part, Peasantry or Light Inside Of Light, begins with a booming swung drum section. A moment of feedback leads us into a massive wall of fuzzy distorted guitars. This is where Godspeed shows off it’s chops at making heavy music. It feels like a towering monster threatening to swallow you whole. About halfway through this section, there is an honest to god guitar solo. For any other post-rock band, I’d accuse them of losing the plot, but it works in this case. It’s the closest Godspeed come to traditional rock songwriting. It’s probably the most melody heavy output of their careers so far. For such a loud track, it’s actually quite pretty; Godspeed does a good job at building melodies into and out of the bed of noise that they created at the beginning of the track. The track explodes at the end, which is useful for what comes next.

The second part, Lamb’s Breath, is the patented Godspeed dread, but magnified a hundred fold. If you think the first part was drony, you ain’t heard nothing. This section almost sounds like a SUNN O))) song. Interestingly for this genre, rather than a build up, this feels more like an extended cool down. This transitions perfectly into the third part, “Asunder, sweet” which is a build that begins with a pinging sonar in the right channel, and gradually increases from there. A double bass stalks around in the back of the track, a predator threatening to eat you. The flutes and violins add a layer of cacophonous noise to the track, breaking up the relative stability of the bass drone.

The final part of this odyssey, Piss crowns are trebled, kicks off with a violin. It’s difficult to tell where this track begins and Asunder, Sweet ends. The two blend into each other almost flawlessly. The drone present here feels like some of Melvin’s slower work, or even the specific type of ambience found in some Boris songs, particularly the 70 minute epic Flood. In either case, the drums are what truly define this track, combing back in with a swinging beat much like the first part, but somehow even darker. When Moya comes in with his patented screwdriver guitar, the track evolves into a guitar based piece that would not sound out of place on Yanqui U.X.O or Slow Riot. Godspeed is beginning to reference themselves, and much like Moya before it, this song too speeds up towards the end. Falling off a cliff in much the same way as that track. However, it feels so much more epic, what with the violins sawing away in the background. This goes double for the final section, where the track balloons to twice its previous size, and one riff takes over the entire composition. The drums pound like a blacksmith at his anvil, the guitars wail like banshees, the violins barely sound like themselves anymore. It is a fitting, explosive ending to one of Godspeed’s most epic, explosive tracks.

Most bands work for quite a long time to build a legacy, but Godspeed achieved what most bands wished they could in three albums, one EP, and five years between the both. Just that, and their musical legacy was secure, even if they never played another note. People knew Menuck was still active with projects like Silver Mt Zion and Fly Pan Am, but Godspeed was preserved in amber, and that was fine with most.

Nobody saw this album coming, not just because of the 12 year hiatus, but because the band has an alarming tendency to drop off the face of the earth in between releases. So when this showed up randomly at their live shows, the post-rock community lost its collective mind. We had one of the legends of post-rock performing live and releasing new music. It was something none of us expected, but were infinitely thankful for experiencing.

I suppose it also helps that the album was really good.

Though there was little completely new material on this album, what is present has been honed to a keen edge. It almost feels like Yanqui U.X.O, but condensed. Take Mladic, the opening track, which opens in a chaotic drone that harkens directly back to Yanqui U.X.O, but which includes a Skinny Fists style sample. The audio sounds like a failed rescue operation of some type, which for a track about middle eastern war crimes, is appropriate. The failure of the peaceful solution and the preparation of war. The guitars come in with rapid downward glissandos that sound like seagulls made of steel and rebar. Atop this is layered clashing percussion sounds that almost sound like something between a guitar and a hammered dulcimer. The main guitar line of this section is heavy and thundering, impossible to ignore in the mix. It’s almost beautiful in how dissonant it is.

The B section is actually swung and far up tempo. It has a screaming violin melody that almost sounds like it’s ripping itself apart: a huge lumbering machine that can’t continue for much longer but will end a country when it fails. The sounds all seem to be in conflict with one another, fitting for a part of the world with so much chaos, even today. The ending section sounds like the final destruction of this machine, everything falling around your ears, collapsing in on itself and rolling into oblivion. The end has audio from a parade or a protest, either way it’s hard to tell, with a percussive music drenching everything in the scene. It’s people marching through the Gaza Strip, refusing to be ignored. It is, by far, the most middle eastern track Godspeed have ever released.

The next track, Their helicopters Sing, is an interesting little piece of drone work. Almost a pallet cleanser to prepare you for the next track. Despite that, it has some incredible imagery unto itself. It feels like the smoldering wreckage of something that was never that great to begin with, the car crash in Dubai where the vehicles were both gaudy and tasteless. Nothing important was lost, and yet it is a loss.

We Drift Like Worried Fire, the third track, has quite possibly the best build I’ve ever heard in a Godspeed track, and is the reason I want to see them perform live at least once before I die. For such a magnificent track, it begins remarkably quietly. Just a simple drone that seems to float just below the surface of the water. The only thing above is a lightly plucked violin, a simple melody that the entire rest of the track will hang off of. The obvious imagery is something rising from the ashes, fully formed and ready to reshape the world in its own image. This begins to slowly accelerate and escalate, introducing guitar, upright bass, bells, and militaristic drums. The violin begins to scream, the guitars become more and more distorted, and just when you can’t possibly take any more, everything falls away except for the distorted violin, wailing in the black. As critics, it is frowned upon to utilize metaphors for food and sex to describe the object of our admiration, but it is unavoidable in this case. The peak of this build is orgasmic. There is no other word to describe it. Sigur Ros wishes they could be this beautifully transcendental. It is one of the best builds in the entirety of post-rock, it’s no wonder that this track became a minor hit on the billboard charts.

The second and third builds are less notable, but both are very Yanqui. So to say, they are both very good. They build to wonderful climaxes in their own right, but the first build is incredible enough that it more than makes up for the rather boring second half.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this album is that Godspeed were largely left to do their own thing. Produced by the great Steve Albini, who famously produced In Utero, the result is one of the rawest records Godspeed has ever released. The samples and mixing are gone, in their place is a wall of noise.

09-15-00, the album opener, begins quietly and sedately. A guitar and harpsichord slowly fade into audibility, followed by drums and guitar. The cinematic qualities of the previous effort aren’t exactly present here, instead there is the presence of noise. Noise and the crescendo. The usual array of instruments are present, guitar, bass, drums, but the band also makes use of a few curious additions: timpani, harpsichord, and The album notes connect the song to the start of the second Palestinian intifada, in which the state of Palestine fought against the oppression of the Israelis. This is where a curious theme is brought into the Godspeed discography - the revolution. Being anarchists, Godspeed has always been about change, but this is one of the only times that they have been so blunt and open about it. This is music about the oppressed and the downtrodden, those left behind in the wake of capitalism. They will return to this theme later in their discography, but for now just keep this in the back of your head.

Rockets fall on rocket falls, the second track, is much the same. The track opens with an ascending guitar lick that will get stuck in your head in some form. The best way I can describe this track in its entirety is the Rite of Spring as written by early 2000s emo kids. The drums do a ton of work when they do come in and allow the track to accelerate into the build. Distorted guitars disintegrate into an almost classically composed section. If you told me that this track was actually a section from a late Beethoven piece I would have believed you. Woodwinds and guitars fill out the atmosphere of the track to the point where it feels the most soundtrack like without being fully cinematic. However, when the guitars do come back in, it is nothing short of cataclysmic. It feels earthshaking in a way that is difficult to explain. One more build takes us out of this track. It is easily the highlight of the album and one of my personal favorites that the band has ever put out.

Motherfucker = redeemer, the final two part track, has the quietest introduction ever. It feels like a pit orchestra warming up. A lone glockenspiel sounds an A as the rest of the band noodles around. It gives the listener an opportunity to catch their breath before the insanity that is to come. The guitar, when it does come in, builds quickly, augmented by tremolo violin and a rapidly tapping drum section. This is part of the reason why I love Godspeed so much, why so many people love them; even on albums that don’t necessarily have a concept, there is no mindlessness. Every instrument is perfectly placed, every sound has a purpose, nothing is wasted. For as long as these songs are, for as indulgent as they can be, the craft here is nothing short of immaculate. The end of the first build is filled with these stabs of noise that fall from thousands of feet up. This dies away quickly, and is replaced with an atmospheric western section that wouldn’t sound out of place on f#a#. Another reprieve, a moment of tension building to allow the track to rocket back up again. And while it doesn’t immediately, we are given this almost weeping, contemplative section to close out the first part. It is incredibly impactful.

The second part kicks off with a drone that honestly wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Trent Reznor’s many projects. Human voices, are augmented by what sounds like bowed guitars. The drone begins light, but evolves over the course of 5 minutes into something dark, angry, and deranged. This is broken by a baseline that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Tool song. Of course, the more obvious comparison would be Mogwai, another contemporary of the band, but with far less grand ambitions. The build up is similarly intense, but swung to give it a more accelerative feel. The most interesting choice they made was the sudden cut to silence. Literally, it feels like the band unplugged their amps, there isn’t even reverb. There is a hidden track on this album, that takes quite a bit of doing to find. It was released later on Adrian Girt’s sound collage album Droopy Butt Begone as George Bush Cut Up While Talking. It is here that the band’s politics most completely reveal themselves in their music. It is a terrifying collage of sound. Clapping that sounds like static, a George bush speech cut up into something unrecognizable and apocalyptic. It is a lambasting of Bush’s nonsense politics, and the people who bought into it. The man could literally say, “I am against kindness” and you would still cheer. It is a critique that has only grown more and more apt with the current era of American politics.

Yanqui U.X.O is powerful noise rock with a powerful message and, though it wasn’t the most well received upon its release, the shadow of this album has only grown not just due to its compositions, but because, though nobody would know this at the time, this would be the last thing we got from Godspeed for 12 years.

Yanqui U.X.O (CD)

I have to say, for all of the incredible releases Godspeed has put out, this is the one that I have the least fondness for. Part of the reason why Yanqui U.X.O. is still regarded as Godspeed’s worst is, I feel, due to the press receiving the CD version rather than the Vinyl version. It is not bad, godspeed has no bad album, rather it is incomplete. To borrow a comparison from video games, it is the handheld port of the console release. The only track that remains untouched is rockets fall on rocket falls, the remainder of the album is split up or heavily truncated. Motherfucker = redeemer loses the ambient intro and plunder phonics outro that helps to form the thesis for the entire album, and 09-15-00 loses its monolithic nature. In total, over 8 minutes of music is cut from the cd release.

The opening of this album is a beautiful build. It starts off almost completely quiet, a lightly plucked guitar and horns pushed deep into the mix allow the early track to breathe. Slowly, more and more instruments are added to the build, escalating almost to the point of insanity. Every time you think the build is over, they find another melody or playing trick or instrument to take it one level higher. It’s almost like the build itself can’t handle it as the track seemingly explodes at the end into a stream of scintillating violins slowly floating down.

They float down to a track that almost sounds like amazing grace. In a similar manner this track escalates, though it features far more stings and fuzz guitars. It almost feels like the shout of joy that a newly created world gives. Godspeed are not christian, but this does speak to me on a faith based level. This may be the christian aspects of my education talking, but it’s almost edenic the way everything in this track seems to be in perfect harmony.

The next section is when humanity learns to sin. The amazing grace riff gets cut off at the neck, the strings tremolo in panic. Thudding sounds and wailing flutes lead us into a section where everything is falling to hell. I hope you liked the brightness, it seems to say, because it is all darkness from here on in. The animals are scrabbling for the cliff edge. All is ruined. This is why I say that this album is cinematic, it twists and turns like a movie. It’s almost as though you’re hearing the introduction of a villain or conflicting force.

A sample from a gas station leads into a haunting piano piece. Menueck seems to pound the keys, in a Beethoven-esque cry of anguish. Military radio chatter drones out in the background, the only part of it understandable being, “It’s gonna be a long long time.” And, in a way, the chatter is entirely correct, it will be a long time for the trauma of this to heal. It is the sonic equivalent of looking out at the darkened plains, radio towers stretching into the distance, from the last lit building for miles around. A gas station on the plains your last sign of civilization in black seas of infinity.

The second track walks into that darkness with a drone. This one seems stable, as though the issue isn’t going away any time soon. “It’s gonna be a long long time”, after all. An atomic clock belts out the time in UTC, which leads into a preacher having a mental breakdown. A wailing violin, an upright bass, and a guitar soundtracks this moment. It’s a profoundly sad moment, her words seem even more unbelievable due to the effects on her voice. It’s equivalent to seeing a hobo ranting to God, only in this case that god more than likely isn’t there. Moments like these make me doubt Godspeed’s connection to Christianity. The band has discussed judaism in connection to their music, and this feels more apt in a Jewish context of faith. The painful absence of God is a major factor in the Kaballistic tradition, and in Judaism as a whole. This leads into a quiet plucked string section reminiscent of F#A#, and this is where the second track’s build becomes overwhelming. Tempo and texture are brought to the fore. The track ends on a drone as well, it’s barely even there, the primordial soup that we all come out of and return to when we die. It’s easily the darkest moment on the album, feeling less like a complete thing and more a handful of transitions. A gallery of people and places at their very lowest.

The third track, sleep, brings in nostalgia. Mourning what is lost. It opens with an elderly man discussing Coney Island, the amusement park in New York that has been relegated to a shadow of its former self. Its primary emotion is sadness for what has been lost. As detailed by the following section with a long slow build to a beautiful crashing conclusion. An inner city western not out of place in the road. One thing that I haven’t really mentioned in any detail is Mike Moya and Efrim Menueck’s screwdriver guitar technique. It can be very difficult to do these sounds in a way that is interesting or easy to digest, but their combination of effects make the guitar sound like singing almost. It seems almost a part of this grand tradition that most independent musicians have participated in where they make their guitars sound like anything but guitars. The true highlight of this track is the second build. It is the breaking of the dawn after the fall to the darkness, the moment where hope pushes back against the doom and gloom. A glockenspiel, like a point of light in the distance, announces its presence against a carpet of droning blackness. The rest of the track is one massive build, the last push to restore the old world, good and bad. From this point forward, hope is the primary emotion.

If sleep is the climax, the fourth and final track, antennas to heaven, is the denouement. The end of this album will make you cry. Just accept it now. It’s just a brilliantly done ending. Despite a strange folk rock opening, where Mike Moya sings a folk song about abusing an infant, we transition into a drone. Far lighter than any other drone on the album, it relaxes and uplifts rather than oppressing. The middle section of this track, “she dreamt she was a bulldozer…”, is your reward for making it through the darkness that is this album. The violin section in this track is almost saccharine, in many ways, it’s the best song Explosions in the Sky never made. The ending of this album is a beautiful float down to peace, it gently leaves you and allows you to return to reality.

The first track, “Moya”, is a testament to what Godspeed can do with a crescendo. This track is a reworking of Goreki’s third symphony, known as the symphony of sad songs, and relates the band’s ability to select a good melody and make it their own while also showing off their classical music heritage. The track first plinks along with little fanfare, but the drums come in around half way through and the track begins to rocket up into the stratosphere. The track escalates, more and more layers being added, screwdriver guitar, electric guitar, bass, pounding drums, glockenspiel, raising a cacophony. And just when you think they can’t go any higher, they drop down, the snare rolls, cymbals crash, and the track launches. The tempo doubles, the drums swing themselves, and guitars pluck harmonies. Then, just as quickly as it reached those dizzying heights, it fades away. Leaving nothing but bowed cello and drums, and those too retreat as the track fades out.

The Second Track, BBF3, has far more in common with f#a#. The samples have returned, the same interview present at the introduction to the third track of the CD version. The music mostly acts in the capacity of a soundtrack in this case, underscoring important moments in the interview. The interview itself is with an unknown man on the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, presumably a poorer man, and takes the form of a rant against the American government and the judicial system. The politics of the band reveal themselves in this moment. At the time the band resisted the label of anarchists, but later self identified as anarchists themselves. One of the core tenets of Anarchism is to listen to the people. The people know what is best and need no government to lead them around by the nose. It is important to listen to these people no matter what they say, for there you will find the truth. As Howard Zinn put it, “The cry of the poor may not always be just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is.” I personally can’t think of any more apt cry than this unknown man’s, “I don't like the judicial system, I don't like the government system, I don't like the police, I don't like anything to do with this country's government. I just don't like it, because... they're sneaky, like I said - they're deceitful, they're lying, they're cheats, they rip the people off. That's the American government for you. America is a third world country, and people don't recognise it... and I think that that's pretty god damn sad, that they don't recognise their own country as a third world, third rate, third class slum.”

There are two crescendoes in this track, and both are very in tune with the formula we have seen so far, if a bit more like a chamber orchestra. Cellos, violins, and piano take a front seat during the quiet parts. I particularly like the militaristic drum beat that underscores the interviewer’s question of, “Are you ready for what’s coming?” Considering the fact that the back cover is instructions in Italian for how to make a Molotov cocktail, the thesis of this EP becomes clear.

If there’s one thing that you can say about the Canadian post rock group Godspeed You! Black Emperor, it’s that they are fascinated by death. Throughout their 26 year history as a group, death has been the one constant in their work, from the death of the world to the death of governments to the death of civility itself. Which, considering the year we’ve just had and the reality we continue to inhabit, is an incredibly relevant thing to be about.

One of the founding bands of the second wave of post rock, they seemingly had more in common with their first wave contemporaries, bands like Swans, Slint, and Bark Psychosis. The members of the band constantly rotated in and out for most of their history, making them more like a musical collective than a formal band. Besides leader and guitarist Efrim Menuck, every member has had stints away from the band over the course of its history. As a result of this rotating cast of characters, the band’s sound can vary wildly from release to release.

The GY!BE story is, ultimately, about the development of a style. From the high concept beginnings to the most recent of meditative conclusions, the GY!BE style is undeniably well known and respected by all who hear it.

For those who want a primer on this legendary band, I hope I can provide a bit of clarity to one of the most fascinatingly opaque bands of the past twenty years.

Buckle up, this is a long one.

Author’s Note: Godspeed You! Black Emperor has a long history of making changes between formats of their albums. I will be treating these as separate projects and will delineate between the two in my reviews.

#F#A#∞ (vinyl)

For all intents and purposes, F#A#∞ is Godspeed’s debut record. However, much like the other aspects of the band, this is a functional half truth. There is one other album, the self released _All Lights Fucked On The Hairy Amp Drooling_, but it was an extremely limited release of 33 copies, none of which have surfaced in the intervening years. It is known that Constellation records has a copy, but as one fan found out, their official stance on the matter is, “You’ll never hear that tape.”

The band founded a studio, the mighty Hotel2Tango, and got to work. The ultimate result of the sessions was two tracks, over twenty minutes each, which would be constellation’s third release as a label.

This album is the soundtrack for the apocalypse. What kind? I don’t know but it makes The Road look like a Care Bears movie. f#a# isn’t the typical apocalypse where there is hope for humanity or memories of what came before like Fallout; this is the oppressive crushing sadness of being completely drained of hope.

Samples of street preachers lead into the stings of the damned, ghost trains wail in the distance, women in robes ask you where are you going, echoing into nothingness. And behind it all, the drones, they are constant. Mike Moya and Efrim Menuck are both incredibly well versed in the use of screwdriver guitar, and it shows on this album. The guitar lines sound as though they are falling apart under their own weight. It is an album full of ghosts, some benevolent some baneful, and you have to get through them if you want to survive.

The first track, “…nervous, sad, poor…” according to the etching into the record’s surface, begins with a drone and a reading from an unfinished screenplay that Efrim Menuck wrote. It is the perfect tone setter for the world this album creates. A train whistle dumps us into the second half of this track. A slow suspended drone is heard, complimented with the falling sliding sounds of screwdriver guitar, which eventually develops into a western melody. This transitions abruptly into another drone, this one sounding as though it is constructed out of wet fiberboard, drowning in reverb. A glockenspiel and happy plucked bass caps off the most obviously post rock section of the track. A brief, almost drunkenly played, folk rock interlude takes us to the end of side one.

Bagpipes and a street preacher introduce us into the second track, “…bleak, uncertain, beautiful…”. The most notable piece of this track, identified by the band as “The Sad Mafioso,” was featured in the film 28 days later. It is easy to see why. This track builds slowly to a climax, a dreary melody plucked on guitar and played on strings. It is the kind of thing that can truly only be felt, as all of the best post rock is. The second section is another build which leads to the repeated sample of “Where are you going?” A sample from Godspell, a cry for openness. The final section is a drone that almost seems to crumble against your ears. The album ends, interestingly enough, in a locked groove. Repeating one section of drone over and over into infinity. A moment, frozen in time. I can’t help but find something poetic in this locked groove ending. You put this world into motion, and you ultimately decide when to destroy it.

In this album, GY!BE put forward their ultimate thesis statement for the human race. We are ultimately going to destroy ourselves, but there’s something beautiful in the destruction.

#F#A#∞(CD)

Interestingly enough, in their early years Godspeed released on two different labels, with Constellation handling the vinyl releases and Kranky handling the CD releases. This was to allow them to make headway in the United States in their early years. Due to this, sometimes there are differences between the albums that cause a significant deviation in how the album is perceived and structured.

It’s hard to believe that Clipping has been around for over a decade at this point, considering how fresh their music sounds.  Daveed is still a wizard on the microphone, and Hudson and Snipe’s production still sounds like nothing else in hip hop.  If you follow this blog, which you should, you already know that There Existed An Addiction To Blood was my favorite album of last year.  It has remained in my regular listening rotation ever since.  It has positioned itself as completely unique in terms of rap, a tribute to all of the horror core artists of the 90s while still being uniquely about our current era’s fears and horrors.  This is nothing new for clipping, all of their albums are incredibly well made little nightmares, but this was the first time that they were this explicit about it.

This new album is made out of tracks that were cut from the There Existed sessions, but still manages to have its own identity.  In its original permutation, as a follow up meant to come mere months after their previous, it makes a great deal of sense.  There Existed’s sound, while still being horrifying, maintained a degree of polish.  There were still moments where you could get down, like on the incredibly fun The Show, or the album opener Nothing is Safe.  That polish is gone on Visions, replaced with teeth.  Most of these tracks harken back to tracks on Midcity and the Face EP, rough bursts of noise and Daveed pounding his way through beats like a giant.

Which is not to say that the album isn’t catchy.  William Hudson and Johnathan Snipes are just as adept at making beats out of weird things, and Daveed can still write a monster hook.  The title track will get stuck in your head, just accept it now, you will be humming it for at least two days after you first hear it.  The elements that make Clipping great are still here, but the hooks are more angry than in any of their recent releasees.  Like on the zombie themed Something Underneath, where Digs breaks up his characteristically fast flow with a hook that beats you over the head with a baseball bat.  Or on Looking Like Meat, which is the closest Clipping has come to sounding like Death Grips for their entire career.  It’s also where Diggs delivers what could be considered the thesis of this album, “No one care about your bars,” he says, “all they wanna hear are your screams.”

For me, the defining moment of this album came at the very end.  Secret Piece is the typical Clipping album closer, a strange ambient track to close out the album.  However, this one does in four minutes what something like Piano Burning takes 18 to do.  This track sounds like a Brian Eno song if Brian Eno was a misanthropist, but what else would you expect from an ambient piece by Yoko Ono.  I listen to this track and suddenly I’m a caveman trying to avoid being eaten by a cave bear.  And that is the experience of this album for me,  a far more raw, primal, primitive kind of horror compared to the higher concept There Existed.  

Despite the pedigree of works like The Downward Spiral, which I have covered in the past, or The Fragile, one of the best examinations of depression in music, Ghosts I-IV remains my favorite Nine Inch Nails album.  This is a controversial take, but I enjoy it not because of the music itself, but because of its feel.  The album is nothing less than life condensed into four records of ambience.  It launched Trent Reznor into the soundtrack business, and would directly result in Atticus Ross joining the band formally, a shocking departure for a band that has been a Trent Reznor project alone for its entire existence.  

Ghosts 5:Together is the comparatively hopeful experience.  This is not to say that the album is without darkness, just that the darkness is balanced out with the light.  The moment where you awake from a nightmare to realize that it was all a dream, even as your heart continues to hammer away in your chest.  The closest comparison would be With Teeth, an album that enjoys its own triumph as much as its own darkness.  However, where With Teeth has more traditional industrial grooves and sounds, Ghosts 5 is completely ambient.  Electronics and piano dominate the album, with occasional appearances from samples and guitars.  The album as a whole is very relaxed.   The opening track, letting go while holding on, introduces a piano theme that is referenced throughout the piece.  While this theme is referenced, distorted, played in minor keys, pitched up, pitched down, and put through every sort of effect you can imagine, it never truly goes away.  Part of the reason I said that this album is more hopeful is because of this theme; I realize we’re getting into English class territory here, but I was an English major so deal.  I believe this theme represents the fact that, even in our darkest moments, when everything seems to be burning down around us, we will always have hope.  Hope is the one thing that our society cannot destroy if we don’t let it, it cannot be struck down by disease, it can’t be shot, choked, tear gassed, or voted out.  Hope is eternal, and it is one of the things that defines our ability to change and grow.

If Ghosts 5 is an optimistic take on the pandemic, then Ghosts 6: Locusts is the pessimistic take.  This is a far darker piece.  A roiling chasm of sound that a tentacle emerges from occasionally before diving back into the mass.  The Cursed Clock opens the album with a lonely piano track that would not sound out of place on the soundtrack for The Shining or A Quiet Place.   We do eventually get more lines of piano and even some electronics, but that line never leaves.   It feels like an inverted parody of the introduction to Ghosts 5.  Reznor has always been an expert in using minimalism to build tension, and this is some of his best work in that department.  The album largely continues in that sphere, only adding instruments and textures, such as on the track Around The Corner, where a trumpet is added.  The fact that I cannot tell whether this is sampled from another track or an original performance is credit to Reznor and Ross’ skills as producers and the incredible atmosphere that this album builds.  This is not to say the album is completely ambient, tracks such as Run Like Hell are intense enough to fit in as a Year Zero instrumental, only that the atmosphere is constant and well developed.  

Leyland James Kirby has made a career of chopping the familiar into the horrifying: from his earliest noise experiments as V/VM, his subversion of country as Billy Ray Cyrix, his perversions of Christmas music as Butcher Claus, to his more etherial projects as The Caretaker, Kirby has an interest in taking familiar and friendly sounds and perverting them into something awful.  Everywhere At the End of Time is a sonic art piece detailing the collapse of the human mind that is created due to dementia.  Over the course of the six and a half hour journey, we see memories fade, twist, and warp to the point where they are unrecognizable, before the void swallows all in the end.  However, you should know going into this that I initially bounced off this album quite a few times.  Each stage sounds similar enough to the previous one that differences are hard to determine or even notice at first.  This is an intentional feature of the album, dementia sneaks up on sufferers, but it does lead to this album being a bit of a slog to get through.  It’s best to approach this project like European art cinema; the kind of thing that is difficult to get through, but is rewarding to the patient, attentive audience.  This is not an easy listen, not by a long shot, but it is a worthy listen.  Each album functions in turn as a different stage, and each one has a different sonic characteristic, ranging from familiar to completely avant-garde.  

Stage 1 is by far the most accessible of the stages.  I’ve heard it described before as, “vaporwave for boomers” and that seems as fitting a description as any.  Both have to do with degradation and looping; the main difference being while vaporwave’s distortion is of a digital nature, Stage 1’s distortion is of a completely analog nature; surface noise, clicks, pops, the sounds of degraded 78rpm records.  The first three albums follow this template, but each one adds slightly more distortion.  Gaps get longer, surface noise becomes more pronounced.  What sounded like a peaceful campfire on stage 1 will, by stage 3, have become completely overwhelming to the music.  Samples and themes are used repeatedly, but always in a more heavily distorted fashion, leaving the listener with a sense that these tracks are familiar, but you can’t place where they came from.  The first stage represents the bliss of the beginning, the last of the good days as the album description puts it.  Stage 2 is when you realize somethings wrong, and stage 3 is when you begin to lose the battle for lucidity.  This transition happens so slowly that, unless you’re listening closely, you might not even realize that it’s happening.  This may be enough to test people who don’t regularly listen to avant-garde music, but the album saves the true horror in knowing for the second half.

Stages 4, 5, and 6 are abstract noise and drone pieces, but to explain them in those cold, clinical terms is to undersell them.  These stages are a trip into hell.  The samples come through but they are scrambled enough to be unrecognizable.  They flow, collide in odd ways, force you to confront how far you’ve fallen into the abyss.  When the grey mist rolls in, there is no more time for reflection or recollection, there is only confusion and pain.  The unfamiliar begins to feel like an old friend, and the familiar feels foreign and alien.  This is the album’s true test, as if the album is saying, “ok, we’ve had fun, but good luck with this.” Stage 4 and Stage 5 are by far the most difficult listens.  These albums activated my fight or flight response, I wanted to escape from these albums, turn them off, go literally anywhere else.  I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing yet.  I actually bounced off these albums the first time through, but forcing yourself to listen carefully and pay attention to the details is incredibly rewarding.  By contrast, stage 6 comes as a relief, despite being labeled without description.  But, perhaps, relief is too strong a word, it’s more the final calm before the end comes.  We are in the belly of the beast when stage 6 begins.  It is peaceful, in a way; not the peace that comes with drifting off to sleep, but the peace in realizing that you can’t prevent the inevitable, no matter how terrible it may be.  The peace in dying from cancer, knowing and accepting that your life is coming to an end, but still being scared of what is to come, even if what is already here hurts.  The last five minutes of stage 6 utterly broke me.  It’s one of three times I’ve teared up listening to music (the other times being listening to Blackstar after Bowie’s death, and listening to American 4 for the first time.) I won’t spoil it here, it is something you must experience for yourself: your final reward for sitting through the hell that is this album.

I know that top 5 season has come and gone much like the cold and flu season, but I caught the tail end of it, so now I can release my version.  You’ll notice a distinct lack of a worst list, this is by design.  I’d rather elevate albums I discovered this year that I liked because, let’s face it, sometimes your album of the year is the one you find not the one that was released.  All of these might not have a review, so you can consider these rapid fire reviews.  1-2 sentences, highlights, who did this, and why I liked it.  Let’s go.

Top 5 of 2019

5. Xiu Xiu – Girl with Basket of Fruit

One of the most twisted albums of this year.  Nothing about this album is pretty, but its message rings true even today.  Mary Turner Mary Turner turned me Antifascist and Antiracist.

4. Slauson Malone – A Quiet Fairwell 2016 – 2018

The Marsalis family does it yet again with this fascinating tribute to sample based hip hop, glitch, field recordings, and lo-fi hip hop.  I can’t wait to see what Jasper does next.

3. Tyler the Creator – Igor

One of the most interesting breakup albums I have ever heard, mostly because I didn’t initially gather that it was a breakup album.  One of Tyler’s most commercial releases, and one that seems to project a new direction for the man.  Can’t wait to see what he does next.

2. Charli XCX – Charli

At this point, Boom Clap seems like a distant memory for everyone’s favorite Lorde clone.  This album is poppy, yes, but also totally unmarketable, and it achieves this by polishing its pop sensibilities to a mirror shine, and from there just continuing.  The result is an album that feels like the 80′s never ended, and the dystopic future is shiny and chrome.  Give it a shot.

1. Clipping – There Existed an Addiction to Blood

Personally, I feel that the album of the year not because it is flawless, or the most technically proficient, but simply because I personally enjoyed it the most.  Daveed Digs has a talent for writing songs that just get lodged in your head and never get out. The horror sensibilities give this album a lyrical and storytelling edge that very few hip hop albums have. 

Top 5 I discovered

5. Klaatu – 3:47 EST

This one came out of left field to me.  I’ve heard this band was mistaken for The Beatles back in 1976 and I can definitely see why, but for the first time I don’t mind the blatant derivative nature of this album. It’s still very lush, pretty, and enjoyable.  The only reason it’s so low on the list is because I haven’t listened to it much. Unlike the following.

4. Kamasi Washington – The Epic

You’ll notice that a lot of my discoveries this year are jazz.  This is because I got into the genre in a big way.  This is the album that did it.  A sprawling jazz epic (ha ha) that covers pretty much everything the genre is doing or has been doing in recent years.  An absolutely mammoth undertaking by Kamasi and crew and one that keeps making its way to my turntable despite it’s 3 hour runtime.

3.John Coltrane – Giant Steps

Duh.  One of the most technical and influential Jazz albums of all time.  Also really pleasant to listen to.  Only reason it’s so low is because it’s been done to the point of commonality.

2. Miles Davis – Big Fun

Really interesting compilation album.  Feels like a less paranoid,  looser, and more fun Bitches Brew.  One of Davis’s most underrated releases.

1. Grimes – Visions

Which is a shame, because, much like Billie, Grimes is an interesting force of personality by herself.  Hailing from Vancouver, Grimes has produced some of the most interesting left of the dial content in indie pop, and nowhere is this more visible than on Visions.

This album is the soundtrack to being at a party and wishing that you were anywhere else.  Tracks such as Vowels = Space and Time do a good job at tapping into this strange, swirling anxiety.  While the verses are almost about spending time with a lover, the lover that Grimes is referring to seems to be herself.  “Being myself makes me feel like I can’t touch the ground Here on the earth makes me feel like I can’t get the sound, Being myself makes me feel like I know who you are.”  This is to say nothing of the stellar Oblivion, one of her most popular songs.  It almost seems on this song that she wants to treat love like a game, like so many others, but she just keeps getting caught in a cycle of falling hard and leaving fast.  “Playing the deck above, It’s always different, I’m the one in love.”

This is to say nothing of the eclectic and strange production.  It feels like if Beach House and Com Truise got together to make a pop band.  The result is one of the strangest, yet most satisfying listens ever.  Be a Body is a great example of this album’s style, sharp synthesizers and a driving bass beat acting as great counterpoint to Grimes’ pillowy, misty voice.  

It’s weird because, for all intents and purposes, I should absolutely hate this album.  I’ve never been a fan of edgy teenage stuff.  If somebody wanted to make a club dedicated entirely to blasting the edgy aspects of teenage life, I would be there in a Linkin Park tee ready to write intentionally bad poetry and loiter in a Hot Topic until mall security kicked me out.

So why do I like this album so much?

Well, I think it comes down to one element in particular, that Billie, and Finneas, her producer and brother, seem to just be having a ton of fun making this album.  With the little bits of studio chatter that make it onto the album on tracks such as !!!!!!! and the end of all the good girls go to hell, we get the impression that this album was created by two people who are absolutely comfortable with each other in the studio. As a result, an album that should have been shipped directly to the used CD rack is an incredibly interesting pop album that is clearly exactly what it wants to be.  

That’s not to diminish the incredible catchiness of this album, after all songs like bad guy, bury a friend, and you should see me in a crown have been permanently stuck in my head, but this album is not entirely pop fluff.  While those songs are a great example of Finneas’ incredible propensity to find the most minimal way to get into your ear and a great vehicle for Billie’s signature breathy yet emotional voice, that’s not the core of the album for me.

The subtler cuts are where this album really shines.  Tracks such as wish you were gay do a great job painting a picture of romantic frustration while also weaving in some neat lyrical tricks (I particularly adore the way the verses count down as they build up to the chorus).  The last two non-remix tracks, listen before i go and i love you, are also incredibly emotionally affecting.  If Billie released and acoustic album, I feel it would be a great success.