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This is a great CD if you need more, but as a first GYBE album, I would start with "F#A#(Infinity)" because it is near-perfect. I picked up "F#A#(Infinity)" f#a# (infinity symbol)from my local library and was absolutely BLOWN away. I have discovered Godspeed and post-rock a decade too late because during the time it was burgeoning I was in graduate school and not paying as much attention to music as I should have been. I am now searching for other bands that are similar in quality to these guys (and girls).if anyone has any suggestions. I have since purchased everything of GYBE I can find. I love them all. I got a list of post-rock bands off of Wikipedia, but there are sooooo many it is difficult to begin. And the ones I started looking at via You Tube or My Space did not seem to have any resemblance at all to GYBE.
strange place. The overall atmosphere this music spreads upon us, although quite somber, brings us comfort of levels with nowhere to fall from.
The theme is solemn perhaps even tragic but so is our present state of earthly affairs, so we find ourselves quite comfortably on this ground. The music is symphonic, although only a few members of the orchestra showed up today.
their thoughts and feelings seem to be. The lyrics come to us straight from the soldiers of their battle fronts.
Their voices might not be the purest but. We are walking the walk with Godspeed You Black Emperor and more we do more we want to stay there in this.
It seems hard to believe the place did not exist before this great Canadian band created it.
If anything, modern digital production gave these bands tools their musical father's only dreamed of. It is not that Godspeed uses loops for hipnotic effect. All the music really was was a bunch of very smart artists who knew their Can and Faust and Cluster and did not give a rats tape loop about making it in the market place.That did not mean that great music was not made. In the 1990s, there was a infinately stupid genre labal called post rock. Turn this music on and you may grow distacted, but once the goose starts cooking, you are suddenly enveloped. If anything, this music comes out of Stockhausan, Terry Riely and Steve Riech.
This takes some time, but eventually, the volume gets quite powerful, and wait long enough, the music sneaks up to provide an indredibly emotional experiance.
Godspeed You Black Emperor is one of the bands that capitalized on this.Godspeed's music really has little to do with rock as we know it.
But listening to the sustained passages.
Cul-De-Sac, Bark Psychcosis and a lot of other bands got thrown in this bag.
The music builds through playing.
On this album, there is no overt beat.
The band starts long pieces quietly, slowly, and builts them into shimmering climaxes.
that almost freeze in time around a tonal center, and you hear the sublte shifts in volume and texture.
Worth your time and attention.
With basically no information inside and a strange letter written by the band. Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven being GYBE's second studio album and 2000 release reminds me of many experimental bans that I have heard before,i.e., Laibach, Yes, Kraftwerk, Einsturzende Neubauten, Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead. Allmusic (4/5) and Pitchfork Media (9/10) both gave it high marks and I agree with this assessment. The use of samples also reminds me of Skinny Puppy. The booklet is very strange. The album is not easy listening and is very challenging but also extremely rewarding and definitely cutting edge without sounding pretentious. 4/5.
The loudest drum rhythms are literally martial in tone but it is the endless energy of the piece that makes "Storm" an absolute landmark for epic rock pieces that nobody before it had ever came close to. When the full band enters, the strings are quite piercing yet make for a remarkably tuneful, even beautiful passage around eight minutes in. Moreover, if one listens carefully, one realises with what passion every member of Godspeed You Black Emperor plays with, notably on the violin solo around thirteen minutes in. When "Storm" moves onto dense drumbeats, the emotional energy and anger it seethes is greater yet. In the darkening mood of the 1990s, Canada's Godspeed You Black Emperor became the most out-there voice in the music world with their combination of radical political narratives and music capable of burning the heart of a listener like nobody ever had before.Whereas bands like Slint, Bark Psychosis and Don Cabellero had founded the quiet-to-loud dynamics that permitted post-rock to move "popular" music to the depth of the heart like it had never been before, Godspeed You Black Emperor added string and horn sections to an already multilayered guitar attack (three guitars) to create pieces that were so much born of teamwork that few of the identities of band members were ever revealed.The way in which the drums and percussion fire when the band does move into kickdown is quite incredible, giving the opening and best track "Storm", the status of being perhaps the most emotional track ever known to rock music. Even if it is too much to sit through each piece in one sitting, just seeing the intensity with which every member plays is enough to make your heart feel so deeply. The last part, as with "Storm", is a kind of anti-climax with strings and synthesisers dominating."Sleep" begins with an old man speaking about Coney Island and then moves onto a very simple guitar line that, though played on an electric, is very remiscent of the acoustic parts of Spiderland. The way Sophie Trudeau's violin solos over intense and visceral guitars around fifteen minutes in is a remarkable feat that should be heard even if you have no time to sit through the whole piece - then, a piercing guitar solo turns "Static" for a few fleeting seconds into the most furious flow of energy that could ever be imagined.
The next part is even more piercing than similar parts of "Static", but the latter half of "Sleep" is again very like Spiderland in its intense guitar work."Antennas to Heaven" begins with a simple folk song whose lightness adds a contrast to the band's work before the fierce guitars and strings return. The buzzing rhythm is then joined by violin and viola to create a hypnotic effect likened to 1970s krautrock. The passion that oozes from even the quietest parts of the song is enough for a definite recommendation: in a part around the nine-minute mark in particular, the emotion of the guitars alone beats anything heavy metal or punk could ever achieve by thrashing and reminds one of Sofia Gubaidulina's masterpiece In Croce. The ferocious attack of three guitars and two basses, however, takes over in the next part around ten minutes in without the song's beauty disappearing. The slow piano at the end seems anticlimactic but the way in which the background noises are put into the song show the band is not lightening up."Static", the other track on the first disc, opens with an electronic ticking rhythm (hence the title, one imagines) before a narrative sounding like a preacher that becomes passionately tearful as it fades out. When the percussion kicks in, however, it gets very fast even over another violin solo. The sound of a child gently singing is a second prelude, for the louder bits of this piece, if still quieter than the other three, are still deep and passionate like almost no other band has ever been, rounding off one of the most remarkable recordings in rock history.With its remarkable changes of mood, tempo and texture infused with a level of emotion that can only be described as overheat, "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven" stands as one of the greatest albums made in the 31 years since I was born. The narratives, as on all Godspeed You Black Emperor albums, add yet another dimension to a unique and truly great group.
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