With their eighth album — No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead (Constellation Records) — Canadian post-rock collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor firmly move into the territory occupied by such bands as Take That, The Pixies, and Smashing Pumpkins in having had major success, before breaking up and then returning to be even more prolific than before.
No Title, (the band’s fifth full-length record since returning from a ten-year break with 2012’s ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!), stays true to the band’s propensity for releasing records with the caps lock button held down while writing album and track titles — a habit we don’t approve of here, but no judgement, this is about the music.
That said, the full title of the band’s latest record is a reference to the number of Palestinians killed in the latest conflict between Gaza and Israel. From this perspective, meaning can be inferred from titles like “Pale Spectator Takes Photographs,” and “Grey Rubble – Green Shoots”. If you want to digest the band’s thoughts regarding the socio-political landscape, you can read the liner notes of their records (available from the band’s label).
As far as the latest record goes, (beyond this initial contextualisation), No Title is a near one-hour journey of instrumental, post-rock, characterised by slowly-building, majestic swells of intensity, that contract and expand across the album’s six pieces.
Would the experience of listening to the record still feel emotionally charged without any context? I do believe so. Founder, guitarist, and keyboard player Efrim Menuck may have once suggested that all music is political, but you don’t need to approach No Title as a political statement to appreciate the elegance of the music.
Following the relatively brief, lilting, almost-oriental-sounding still waters of album opener “Sun is a Hole Sun is Vaports.” “Babys in a Thundercloud” is the first of several grand, extended pieces where hypnotic, pulsing bass and swirling ambience slowly build into peaks of quite gorgeous, even majestic crescendos.
With at least eight band members and a plethora of stringed instruments, it’s impressive that No Title manages to integrate its layers without sounding messy or overly busy. With the rising and the falling throughout, you could say that the album’s musical journey is somewhat predictable. This isn’t avant-garde music where everything suddenly shifts into a totally unexpected mode. However, it would be churlish to deny the beauty and grace of the record’s flows.
The previously mentioned “Pale Spectator Takes Photographs,” (with its off-kilter march, weaving violins and rhythmic drums pounding like a religious ceremony), has the band tentatively reaching for the majesty of King Crimson’s “Starless.” At other times the record seems to be soundtracking a spaceship slowly circling Earth (“Raindrops Cast in Lead”), or an electrical buzz carrying through a landscape of telephone lines (on the dark and unsettling “Broken Spires at Dead Kapital”).
In its entirety the album is like a dance of one fluid motion that never loses its step. I still don’t like the caps lock though.
Buy the album here:
https://cstrecords.com/en-gb/products/cst183
8 / 10
TOM OSMAN
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