No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Release date: October 4, 2024Label: Constellation
As the world’s evils continually provide them with inspiration, Quebec’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor continue their fight to raise awareness for those who cannot. Hence the perspicuous title of their eighth album, No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead. The destruction in Gaza is truly horrific on a humanitarian level and Godspeed You! Black Emperor have created a highly emotionally charged record.
Opener ‘SUN IS A HOLE’ starts with a murmuring of unidentifiable sounds while a lone guitar plays out a melancholic melody before being joined by those trademark sighing strings. The atmospheric is very much isolation and conjures images of a windswept desert in your mind. This album finds itself as a soundtrack to some of the most horrifying imagery in the news, of the bloody destruction in the Middle East. It is impossible not to correlate this deeply emotional music with the terrible tragedy of what is happening to innocent people in Gaza.
In ‘BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD’ shimmering guitars flicker like heat rising on a desert plain. Delicate percussion rises up to underpin the guitars as they settle into the main droning riff. The instrumentation begins to fill out with a myriad of strings and the glorious main melody drops bringing euphoria and hope, like rains falling on deserts. There’s a wondrous intermittent guitar tone that sounds like a wounded animal trying to rise up to its feet. I listened to this track for the first time as a full moon set in the dusk sky and the sun started to rise behind me. It was one of those rare moments that only happen in life fleetingly. I was glad to be safe and alive. Not everyone in the world gets the choice to feel that way, yet we share the same moon and sun. At the track’s closure the guitars have a defiant bite to them as the strings become more rigorous and that guitar/wounded animal gets to screech with a glorious life affirming sound.
GY!BE are never in a hurry, the first two minutes of ‘RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD’ are field recordings, sounds like baby birds tweeting. Before long the band crank into life with another Middle Eastern toned guitar line. Before long the drums are getting a workout as the drones are added to with surging strings and more guitars spidering out wondrous melodies. As the finale of the track starts to rise to a cathartic emotional release of quickened beats, surging strings and swirling distorted guitars, triumphant fists are undoubtedly being raised. As is typically the way of a GY!BE album, the longer tracks are interspersed with shorter interludes of varying degrees of lesser instrumentation or field recordings. ‘BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL’ has minimal stringed instruments playing a mournful passage that brings the previous raucous atmosphere to a funereal and deathly silence by comparison.
The mood continues with the eery tones of ‘PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS’ which feels like the soundtrack to a scene of utter devastation, as the only life to be found is the protagonist of the track’s title. After a period of calm the drums begin to thud as deep strings cycle under an apocalyptic and hellish droning loop. An alarm (actually quickly tapped cymbals) sounds while the guitars and strings rush to the fore to get in position for a section of beautiful melodic tones that pacify and soothe. The track storms towards its end in a tornado of swirling guitars and strings as the percussion cracks with intensity. A final tranquil sigh of gentle guitar work and fading strings brings the heart rate down a little.
The lead/closing track from the album begins with the startling siren sounding guitars that herald the opening of ‘GREY RUBBLE-GREEN SHOOTS’. These reverbed tones are unique to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, they could not belong to any other act. Drums drop like bombs as the track surges into life with a host of droning guitars and strings that dance over the mix with swirling elegance. The orchestration is sublime when Godspeed get into full flow. These are actually modern-day symphonies. It’s utterly tragic that vile real-world events have inspired such magnificent music. The second half of the track is a melancholic and highly emotional passage of shimmering guitars and sorrowful strings.
I’m not a particularly knowledgeable person when it comes to politics and history. But it’s impossible to escape the news and have some thought on the truly horrific events going on in the world we live in. It’s always heartbreaking to me that people just cannot get along and there are those hellbent on destruction who have absolutely no value or regard for life. The music on this record affected me deeply. This band of musicians have been provoking emotions in me for 27 years with their intense but beautiful music. Here’s yet another remarkable collection of moving soundscapes that says so much without words.
