Since their formation in Montreal 30 years in the past, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have come to appear timeless, their imposing musical aesthetic and DIY modus operandi wholly unaffected by adjustments in know-how or the music business. Until you’re studying their liner-note communiques intently, there’s little on a proper stage to differentiate a 1999 Godspeed file from a 2021 one. However the title of Godspeed’s eighth album immediately dates itself—and that’s the purpose. As textual workouts go, “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” is like The Zone of Curiosity condensed to album-spine format, contrasting the mundane formalities of naming a file with the horrors unfolding in Gaza on the time of its conception whereas additionally forcing us to think about the place that quantity stands at the moment. The duvet artwork conveys a equally defeatist air—in lieu of the artfully blurred pictures or evocative illustrations of outdated, we get a stark image of substances, furnishings, and soiled cutlery strewn a few airtight jam area, as if the band was too numbed to provide you with every other concepts.
However whereas discussions of Godspeed’s music typically revolve round their staggering quiet-to-cataclysmic ascents, the band’s actual energy lies of their emotional dynamism, and the way in which the tone of their work can so simply flip from tragic to triumphant. From their earliest days, Godspeed have carried out with Tremendous-8 movies projected behind them, and at a sure level in every present, the flickering photos of cityscapes give strategy to a easy handwritten message—“HOPE”—that appears prefer it was scrawled by somebody making an attempt to carry onto their sanity deep right into a prolonged jail sentence. However on their most up-to-date albums, Godspeed have handled “HOPE” extra like a Bat sign: Because the world’s doom spiral has accelerated, Godspeed have responded with probably the most elating music of their canon. And whereas the title “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” gives an unspeakably grim reminder of the context that birthed it, the music sounds extra defiantly exultant than ever.
“NO TITLE” shouldn’t be with out its mournful, meditative passages (might an interstitial monitor referred to as “Damaged Spires at Lifeless Kapital” be something however?), however the album extra steadily gives accessible and expedient pathways to its moments of communal ecstasy. It’s a file that welcomes you in slightly than making you’re employed for it: With its valorous guitar intro, sweetly swelling strings, and gently jazzy drums wafting in like a cool breeze, the opening “Solar Is a Gap, Solar Is Vapors” has no real interest in scaling the identical heights as Godspeed’s most volcanic epics; slightly, it invitations you to savor an expertise that’s as easy and profound as a dawn. Likewise, the bookending nearer “Gray Rubble – Inexperienced Shoots” is one other relative rarity within the Godspeed canon, packing the slow-climb/crescendo/comedown schematic of a 20-minute suite into a comparatively concise 6:57. By Godspeed requirements, this feels virtually like a pop single (and all of the extra so once you notice its central round melody kinda appears like “Chopsticks”).
