Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Faster Horses
It is alleged that Henry Ford once remarked that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Well, no one would have asked for this. Impossibly pretentious and convoluted to the point of parody, Canadian band Godspeed You! Black Emperor (or Godspeed You Black Emperor, depending on the day of the week) make music for nobody. Described as cold, barren, distant, and distrustful, their work looms over the genre of ‘post-rock’ with disdain and disinterest.
Apathetic towards the thought of being lumped together with the car commercial quibbles of Sigur Ros and staying away from the chronically cathartic noodling of Mono or Explosions in the Sky, GY!BE have remained one of the most vitriolic, unlikable, important, and vital bands in the world. Nobody asked for this, and we’re all the better for it.
From 1997 to 2002, the band released three albums and an EP. Their very first album has been lost; All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling is now more of an urban myth for collectors, some kind of audio cassette Camelot. They went dark for ten years before resurfacing all of a sudden with 2012’s Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
Almost as though they had never been away, the new record brought the old drones, the rising clatters, and the suffocating insistence up to date. There was the same old socialist allusions, the same sense of the heavens falling in; these were Chicken Little tape loops for the soundcloud generation. Released amid a tour, the album appeared on merch tables one day, sneaking its way into existence.
As a live act, the band has always been about more than the music. Of the listed associates on the band’s Wikipedia page, three separate people have been placed in charge of film projections. Support acts are out of the question and the audience interaction is limited to providing just enough light that you might not stamp on everyone’s toes.
With video footage of train tracks, dark woods, street preachers, falling bombs, and the film itself falling apart, the idea is to create an atmosphere of paranoid indifference. A nihilist island with just enough water. Though regarded as a taciturn band, the Canadians instead carve out a crucial place in the middle of existence, like reading The Road with a warm hand on your shoulder. Sure, there’s ash falling around you and there is nothing to eat and nothing left and we tell ourselves, things could be worse. Maybe.
Now there is another record and another tour. Tighter and more focused than previous efforts, Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress is their shortest full length to date. The recorded monologues are gone, replaced by a vicious distillation of the escalation formula. All crescendos banged out on bone drums. The quickest way from quiet A to thundering B. The effect of the well-traveled road; the listener has been here before but stumbles anyway, going through a similar route, just to see how much more everything has fallen apart.
The final track, Piss Crowns Are Trebled, is the song of the year, regardless of how it actually sounds. Available for streaming on the Guardian website, the band will be bringing their distressed pessimism to a theatre near you. You can discover the twists and the turns of the route yourself.
Playing at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire on Monday, April 20th, you can travel with them past the rows of burning cars, crushed people, and shattered windows. Nobody asked for this, we just wanted faster horses.
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