Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Yanqui U.X.O.

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR: YANQUI U.X.O. (2002)

General verdict: Probably falls in the category of «noble slump» — a solid effort which pales in comparison with the obvious masterpiece and ends up feeling less powerful than it actually might be.

GY!BEʼs third (and last before a lengthy hiatus) full-length release is a fairly difficult album, and opinions of it are quite mixed — at the very least, it is safe to say that it hasnʼt gone down in history as an indisputable classic, like its predecessor, and yet you can occasionally find people ready to swear by it as an actual significant impovement over Lift Your Skinny Fists, and not just because they want to sound different (though thereʼs always that, too). For a band with such an instantaneously recognizable sound and such a rigid artistic conception as GY!BE, this polarization is pretty intriguing.

Arguably the single most important and definitive feature of Yanqui U.X.O. is its complete reliance on pure musical means to achieve its goals — no vocals, no field recordings, no creative overdubbing, just the band busy making music with its actual instruments. This comes across as a surprise, all the more so in the face of the albumʼs rather clear political message: both the title, where U.X.O. admittedly stands for ʽunexploded ordnanceʼ, and the cover art hint at relations between major record labels and arms manufacturers — and, with the album released in the aftermath of 9/11 and the intervention in Afghanistan (fortunately, the Iraq War had not yet begun at the moment), there are occasional anti-system elements, such as a hidden track with a cut-up and sampled George W. Bush speech at the end (guess we now know who the alleged "motherfucker / redeemer" might actually be).

This is a very good decision by itself — for those of us, at least, who believe that music should be allowed to speak for itself, without serving as a direct backdrop to other forms of, uh, artistic manipulation — but it does not solve the obvious problem of where exactly to go next once you have clearly hit your artistic peak. After the giant effort of Lift Your Skinny Fists, where it seemed that the very understanding that they were going after something truly monumental might have served as a source for inspiration, the band had to pay the true price for it by becoming prisoners of their own reputation. Had GY!BE been a smaller, and thus, more flexible outfit, they might have cracked this puzzle by choosing a significantly different musical direction. But with so many people in the band, they probably could not have reinvented the formula even if they tried to — too many brains to reshape, too much training to undo.

The result is that Yanqui U.X.O. is essentially just more of the same — without the elements of surprise, without nearly the same feel of monumentality, without (arguably) nearly the same number of strong, memorable main themes, but with the impression that the group may be somewhat maturing and deepening their craft as musicians. To me, of course, that is not a win type of situation, not even in terms of writing, because I find myself somewhat at a loss when it comes to finding new ways of describing the achieved effects. The base principles, after all, remain the same — lock onto a theme, build it up into a steady overpowering crescendo, climax, calm down, spend a bit more time to recover the expended energy, then rinse and repeat. They did this four times on the previous album, they do it just three times here, and something keeps telling me that they simply did not want to expend more money on a double-CD package: with accuracy and precision, the album runs for 75 minutes and not a second more.

Even with the formula already well-established, it seems there is a lack of ideas right from the start. ʽ09-15-00ʼ, for instance, takes about six or seven minutes to properly get going where it took ʽStormʼ only three of these; when the mournful neo-classical violin melody finally emerges as the main theme around which the battle forces begin rallying themselves, it is a strong and passionate moment, but it takes way too goddamn long to develop. It does not help, either, that the second crescendo seems like a rather uninspired repetition of the first, or that ʽPart Twoʼ of the suite is a six-minute long piece of pure ambience that does not even think of going anywhere. You can certainly visualize the whole thing as a musical battle, in which ʽPart Twoʼ represents a musical interpretation of the battlefield after the deed is done, but the whole thing is just way too meandering. Itʼs almost as if the lazy approach of Silver Mt. Zion on their latest album was negatively rubbing off on the entire band in general.

Things definitely begin to pick up with ʽRockets Fall On Rocket Fallsʼ, which is the bandʼs first, and fully successful, attempt to try out their crescendo principle on a waltz structure — actually, there are two distinct parts here, both of them good: the opening waltz is like an attempt to superimpose the atmospherics of OK Computer onto Johann Strauss Jr., and the second part is a dark, creepy, mildly Wagnerian build-up, very heavy on booming cavernous percussion and fuzzy bass tones and, indeed, quite suggestive of Wotanʼs and Logeʼs journey into Alberichʼs subterranean kingdom, though I doubt they themselves ever thought of it that way. In any case, ʽRockets Fallʼ to me seems like the unquestionable centerpiece of the album and the only one of its lengthy suites to fully deserve the 20-minute length.

Not that there arenʼt any good things to say about the third piece: ʽMotherfucker=Redeemerʼ starts out quite hilariously, quickly becoming... a disco-themed post-rocker, mayhaps the only one of its kind, and kudos to the band for managing to maintain the overall feel of mournfulness and impending doom while upholding the quirky dance rhythm all the time. There is a touch of irony here, and at least it feels nice to know that the band can do its crescendo schtick at faster tempos. Once the mad dance of destruction is over, it transforms into a slow, jarring, heavy, feedbacky mess of garbage sound — think Neil Youngʼs soundtrack to Dead Man as a potential textural and mood-wise predecessor — which is impressive enough for a couple of minutes. Alas, the song takes way too much time to wind down, and then there is ʽPart Twoʼ, which throws on yet another aggressive crescendo — the lengthiest of ʼem all — but fails to make a fresh point; it is more about making the album go out on a loud and aggressive note than anything else.

As you can see, itʼs not as if the band is creatively spent: it is more like it is thoroughly trapped in its own formula, with the potential to still occasionally squeeze something decent out of it, but on the whole it is a 50/50 chance of producing something curiously interesting and something that just triggers the been-there-done-that vibe once again. It is clearly a record made by masters of their trade, yet on the whole there is a whiff of failure about it — for all the monumentality, they do not try hard enough to expand into uncharted territory, even if ʽRocket Fallsʼ and the «mock-disco» section of ʽMotherfuckerʼ clearly show that such territory still exists, even within the set boundaries of the formula.