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. 

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR: LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN (2000)

1) Storm; 2) Static; 3) Sleep; 4) Antennas To Heaven.

General verdict: And they said Yes was "pretentious"... then again, maybe Heaven just loves symphony more than virtuosity.

[Note: This is a slightly reworked and adapted version of a review that was previously posted in the Important Album series.]

While it is now perfectly clear that GY!BEʼs unquestionable masterpiece did not exactly appear out of thin air — for six years, the band had been meticulously laying down all the necessary foundations — this seems to have really been the first time when our Canadian friends had the perfect opportunity and the full capacity to say everything they had to say and say it precisely the way that they wanted to. I might be slightly biased here, of course, having a bit of personal history with that album: I remember all too well how in the early 2000s, desperately craving for fresh ideas and new insights in music, I was sent the record, lovingly burnt on CD-R, by a music fan who set himself the tough goal of convincing cranky old (actually, still young) me that there was still quite a bit of mind-bendingly innovative music being produced in our time, and included GY!BE among the specimens — and out of all the specimens, this was the one that made the most impression on me at the time. And not just on me: you could easily trace the huge, huge influence of that record on the entire musical decade following it — pretty much every British, Canadian, or US indie band with grandiose symphonic ambitions, from Arcade Fire to British Sea Power, owes a large chunk of its spirit to Lift Your Skinny Fists. (The major difference being that GY!BE wisely preferred to keep their mouths shut, heh heh).

In terms of sheer scope, the world already had certain predecessors to this experience, all of them in the «post-rock» aesthetics — a close match is Sigur Rósʼ Ágætis Byrjun, whose own influence on the planning and construction of GY!BEʼs soundscapes can hardly be denied. And yet the genre had not yet truly produced its own Tales From Topographic Oceans — a sort of mega-statement that would cause people to sit up and not simply go «ooh, what a heavenly slice of beauty!», but crank it up to an «ooh, what a glorious way to summarize all the mysteries of the Universe!» And ultimately, it was only a matter of time before somebody would get the gall to go for oneʼs own «symphony of a thousand» — well, in GY!BEʼs case, «symphony of nine» would be more accurate, but add the appropriate decibel power and you can get a thousand-like effect in no time anyway. Like it or not, the result was one of the most important albums of the year, whose repercussions would be heard loud and clear over the next decade.

For all its scope and ambitiousness, the album in its entirety was recorded in a very pedestrian location (Chemical Sound Studios in Toronto) and over a rather short period of time (February 2000), which is probably responsible for the recordʼs semi-spontaneous nature, since only its basic themes were pre-composed, while many of the drones and crescendos that form its bulk were largely improvised in the studio. Since this is their masterpiece, after all, let us briefly recall the bandʼs core line-up at the time: Efrim Menuck (guitar and general leadership), David Bryant and Roger Tellier-Craig (guitars), Mauro Pezzente and Thierry Amar (bass), Bruce Cawdron and Aidan Girt (drums), Norsola Johnson (cello), Sophie Trudeau (violin; not to be confused with Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau, who plays Justin). There were also a couple of semi-anonymous guest horn players, going by the names of Alfons and Brian (although where the hell is the C in this alphabetic sequencing?). Also, the producer was Daryl Smith, who (as of 2019) does not even have his own Wikipedia page, so fuck him (okay, just joking — he must have done quite a bit of a job to get all that noise to sound properly coordinated); and the record label was Kranky, whose main alternate claims to fame since then were probably acts like Deerhunter and Tim Hecker, but otherwise I am largely ignorant of all those other obscure artists they had harbored.

The album was originally conceived as a coherent and symbolist statement — improvised or not, it has a certain masterplan of which only vague hints are given by way of the track titles (and also the lengthy subtitles to individual sub-sections of each track, including such cryptic sequences as ʻCancer Towers On Holy Road Hi-Wayʼ and ʻEdgyeswingsetacidʼ) and album art (including a diagram of each of the four movements, personally written by Menuck and included in the vinyl edition of the record). Each of the movements occupies one side of vinyl (so the Topographic Oceans reference is at least formally spot on) and is supposed to be appreciated in its entirety, although the album as a whole, I believe, may be cut up into four distinct listening experiences stretched over four days — in fact, this would probably be the right way to soak it in at first, rather than let you get lost and confused in its no-ship-on-the-horizon ambient infinity. But, in any case, there is no direct, unambiguous meaning to any of the musical parts, all of which are wide open to emotional and intellectual interpretation.

Upon release, the album got almost nothing but positive reviews; however, due to the enigmatic and attention-demanding nature of the music, critical success was not enough to turn the band into a viable commercial proposition, and even after their relatively recent reunion (by which time the legend had enough time to take root, mature, and stabilize) album sales continue to be rather low — not that, honestly, anything else could be expected from a band that specializes in 20-minute long droning instrumentals, no matter how inventive, unique, or emotionally shattering they might be. (Which does make it fun to compare them with Arcade Fire, who have always had an instrumentally comparable lineup, but who also, from the very start, were setting their minds on the pop format in order to, quite intentionally, break on through to a larger audience to spread the good word. This, by the way, kind of makes GY!BEʼs achievement all the more amazing, since it takes far more guts to hold together a large bunch of people with no initial hopes of commercial success than a bunch of people who at least had the explicit hope of becoming a household name some day).

One ugly reservation that I always hold against post-r..., uh, symphonic-ambient bands is the nagging suspicion that, you know, they really play like this mainly because they cannot really play their instruments all too well, and so they mask their lack of technical skill through sheer numbers: number of people in the band, number of decibels collectively produced by all the instruments, number of minutes it takes them to finish, etc. etc. Then I have to remind myself that the reason why Keith Richards is (or, at least, was) such a cool guitar player is because he couldnʼt play the guitar all too well, and the argument subsides. It is probably true that no subsection of GY!BE could ever properly cover a Rush or even a Talking Heads tune if they were pressed to, but that is not the point. The point is: when they get together, all nine of them (eleven if you throw in the mysterious Alfons and Brian on horns) — is it actually worth getting together? Is there a certain «band of angels» feel emanating from these tracks, or does it all seem like primitive and/or puffed-up sonic nonsense?

On the whole, you can predict that the question here is largely rhetorical and the expected answer is an overwhelming yes — although I will not deny that chunks (even large chunks) of the record tend to lose my attention every once in a while, but then again, so do large chunks of Mahler symphonies, where some parts often act, sometimes intentionally, as catch-your-breath interludes where you are allowed, by the composer himself, to let your mind freely roam for a while before it is thrown and stunned once more by the next onslaught. The entire record has an intelligent flow — from the first and most regal crescendos of ʻStormʼ to the dirge-like and catacomb-like sounds of ʻStaticʼ to the howling nightmare ghosts of ʻSleepʼ and, finally, the somewhat anti-climactic (but probably intentionally so) mix of romanticism and noise psychedelia on ʻAntennas To Heavenʼ. You could construe it as anything: a multi-stage journey through various phases of enlightenment, a soundtrack to an imaginary documentary on the private and public life of Gandalf the Grey, a set of impressionistic musical comments on a set of paintings in an art gallery, but there is a sense of unity to all four pieces that means more than just being played by the same people. We do have a symphony here, with an expected alternation of tempos, moods, and purposes all working towards the same goal, and it is your own, wholly subjective, job to try and figure out what that goal might be.

To increase the sense of seriousness, GY!BE often use sampled voiceover passages that are quite pretentious all by themselves — an impassioned sermon in ʻStaticʼ, an old codgerʼs nostalgic reminiscences on the former beauty of Coney Island in ʻSleepʼ, a somewhat sadistic folk song at the beginning of ʻAntennasʼ — none of which seem to be of particular importance individually, but collectively they serve to reinforce the very feeling of importance: Religion, Memory, and Folklore are all invited to come together and cast their blessing on the music. So if the music did not qualify, it would all be one heck of an embarrassment; and if you are used to short and concise pop songs, or even to complex progressive epics with lots of dynamic surges, rousing tempos and twisted time signatures, as your default style for enjoying music, it might be very easy to get the impression that the music absolutely does not qualify. But it does. To continue the classical analogy, even while form-wise the closest analogy is an 80-minute Mahler symphony, substance-wise this is rather the symph-ambient equivalent of what could happen if a Debussy or a Ravel would want to come up with a Mahler-like 80-minute symphony. (Most likely, a thing like that would get very mixed responses — but then again, so do these guys, unless you only count reactions from top dog critical sources).

The top trick of the band is the trademark GY!BE crescendo, the art of which they had mastered to near-perfection on this album and would never again top on any subsequent releases. On the opening track, ʻStormʼ, thereʼs two of them: first, a six-minute triumphant one, as if announcing the arrival of some royalty (God of Art?) on the scene, and then comes the second, properly "stormy" one, with a distorted echoey guitar rising high above the other instruments and the whole thing eventually speeding up into a mad gallop. But the individual instrumental parts, even when they are playing a pretty melody (and quite often they are — in between all the droney pretty melodies on here, they have pretty much written the blueprints for the entire career of Beach House), are denied serious meaning: it is only the build-up that counts, the way additional instruments are slowly and meticulously piled up and up and up and all the different guitar and string drones are woven into a single complex pattern and then the drums and horns give them extra muscle and... well, might as well regard this as a metaphor for the Emergence and Evolution of Life Itself, from the first living cell and all the way up to Homo Sapiens, though, as I have said, there can be any number of possible symbolic interpretations here.

The most powerful crescendo on the album, however, is ʻSleepʼ (the ʻMonheimʼ section), where everything is taking place around one incredibly sad looped riff played on... well, I actually have no idea what the instrument is before the drums kick in and the tempo speeds up. A specially treated guitar sounding like a musical saw? Regardless, the track makes perfect local sense coming off the old manʼs rant about the faded glories of Coney Island, as if it were some sort of lonesome spin on an abandoned Ferris wheel, going slowly round and round until, at about 9:20 into the track, some devilish force grips it and sends it into a much faster spin — accelerating, accelerating, until the mad force rips it out of the foundation and just sends it spinning into outer space, with detached flaming bits and pieces hitting the ground. This is a prime example of the magic touch these guys have: the main melody is simple and monotonous, but they can bind you to your seat for about ten minutes with it, just by adding here and subtracting there and playing with the volume level and the constantly changing role of different instruments in the mix.

By the time the album is over — especially if you managed to take it all in one go — you might not be exactly certain what it is that you have just experienced, but there will be a feeling of epic monumentality that no Sigur Rós album can provide (not that it tries to). It might be fanboyish to declare the entire experience as a complete compendium of the human emotional spectrum, but, actually, it does not pretend to be human. Very clearly, to me at least, it pretends to be an approximation of Godly Music — you know, of the Valar, of the Olympian Gods, whatever; sounds produced by Gods, consciously or subconsciously, as they initiate, witness, or remember some important processes of the Universe. Nobody sings; nobody even really «plays», more like «spins» the music the same way the Moirai spin their threads of fate. Who knows, maybe they just spun your personal thread somewhere in there, too. Could take a couple hundred extra listens to find it in the haystack.

If we are in the mood for some dirt, then complaining about the songs not being catchy would be by far the stupidest accusation one could fling against the album — (a) because this style is not supposed to be catchy and (b) because these melodies are repeated so many times over, theyʼre all catchy anyway. What bothers me more is that those parts of the record that are not crescendos do tend to lose my attention and dissipate the accumulated effect. The last chunk of ʻStaticʼ, for instance, completely passes me by (the one that is dominated by bass rumbles and industrial percussion — not tremendously original), but the biggest disappointment is the last track, where, at the end, right after the cool little bit of The Return Of The Son Of Dark Country that reminds me of the first album, you sort of expect an arch-monumental conclusion and instead get a few minutes of minimalistic electronics that sound like a deconstructed fugue for digital organ in a bombed out cathedral. (Hmm, that description now reads more cool to me than the actual sonic part). A bit anti-climactic, though it is also true that with an ambient / drone / minimalist aesthetics like this one, ending the record with a pompous power chord was probably not an option, no matter how you look at it.

More problematic is the issue of ambition: the record almost literally insists that you take it very, very seriously — I mean, Yes and ELP are practically painted clowns next to the religious fervor of Efrim Menuckʼs gang here, and I am not sure if I completely subscribe to this. What bugs me quite a bit is that the album is, indeed, monumental, but it is rarely intimate: individual instruments are not properly permitted to speak out against others, and even if they start quiet and sensitive, everything is eventually drowned in loudness: their strength and weakness at the same time, as if they were a Pink Floyd that never allowed itself to move past the ʻCareful With That Axe, Eugeneʼ phase. Lots of gorgeous soundscapes here, yes, and yet, not a single one that would actually grip my heart tightly and wring out some tears, even abstract ones, you know, for the sake of all humanity or whatever. (This, by the way, is where the Mahler analogy fails completely, and youʼd do better to seek a new one, maybe with something like Renaissance choral oratorios or Baroque cantatas). I guess that the skinny fists in question are lifted like antennas to Heaven, and that the signal is properly received, but maybe there is simply too much Heaven and not enough skinny fists in the record to make me fall in genuine love with it, rather than be awed by its monumental presence. Alas, such may be the reasonable price of monumentality.

In any case, I have no doubt whatsoever that Lift Your Skinny Fists was one of the most important albums of the year 2000, and possibly the best candidate (much better than Kid A, for that matter) for the hotly contended title of «album most likely to point out a new way for music in the coming millennium» (in the long run, it did not, but who could have made predictions at the time?). The problem is that it could not avoid the fate of becoming a niche product: too simplistic to merge rock instrumentation with classic symphonic values, too pretentious and long-winded to satisfy the basic tastes of pop/rock fans en masse, and probably too rockish to interest the already small bunch of avantgarde/modern classical followers. Not that it doesnʼt continue to have a large enough fan base — its legacy in the «canon» seems assured by now (it is one of the very few albums from 2000 onward to make it into the Top 50 albums of all time on the democratically voted RateYourMusic list, for instance), not to mention the already stated durable influence that may be seen on almost any indie band that has more than five playing members in it. Plus, there is absolutely nothing wrong about being a niche product, either (almost any good album in the 21st century is one); and I am perfectly fine with people calling it a masterpiece and finding no flaws in it whatsoever.

Somehow I feel that the album could have been even better than it was, if only they didnʼt stick to their guns with such utmost fervor — but how, I am not sure. Make it a little shorter? throw in a few guitar solos? vary the tempos? add vocals? This all seems like it could threaten their Olympian God identity, which is not something I would like to have happened. Still, you know, I might be just a tad happier if they could at least invite a lowlife like Hercules for a drink every once in a while. Then again, perhaps Lift Your Skinny Fists is not altogether about exceptional events — it is more like a diary of the everyday, routine life of supernatural entities, and maybe we should all count ourselves lucky to be invited to share that particular «day in the life».

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR: SLOW RIOT FOR NEW ZERO KANADA (1999)

1) Moya; 2) Blaise Bailey Finnegan III.

General verdict: The subtle, but important transition from cowboy post-rock to symphonic post-rock.

This relatively short (ultra-short for GY!BE standards, actually) EP tends to get lost between the two monumental albums that surround it, but it doth have its place in the bandʼs history — its two tracks are quintessentially transitional between the mournful ghosttown soundscapes of F♯A♯∞ and the monumental tsunamis of Lift Your Skinny Fists. Admittedly, if you are not a major fan of the band, it is skippable; but if you ever wondered about any «missing links» on the way from out there to over here, Slow Riot is just the thing to supply you with the necessary evidence.

ʽMoyaʼ, the track named after the bandʼs guitar player, is arguably the very first «trademark» crescendo in GY!BE history — slowly growing out of a half-harmonious, half-dissonant pool of drawn-out cello and violin chords and eventually werewolfishly transforming itself into crashing barrages of shoegazing guitar pandemonium. All it lacks to ascend the heights of Lift Your Skinny Fists is the production: overdubs and echoes have not yet been mastered to the level where they become subconsciously associated with Olympic gods. (I would also add that the hook potential of the riffs and drones is weaker than whatever would come to be, but this is subjective).

The second track largely milks the same kind of groove, except that this time the proceedings are occasionally interrupted by field recordings — this time, we get a guy who goes under the moniker of ʽBlaise Bailey Finnegan IIIʼ, complains about the evil nature of The System, and then reads one of his «poems» that happens to be a variation on the lines of Iron Maidenʼs ʽVirusʼ (written by their then-current vocalist Blaze Bayley). This is good, actually — it shows that the band has a subtle sense of humor, and that their social agenda had not completely turned them into one-track minded zealots. Other than that, the track is twice as long as ʽMoyaʼ and therefore allows itself not one, but two crescendos — the two-crescendo thing would become standard for Lift Your Skinny Fists — before slowly and smoothly fizzling out with Gorecki-influenced romantic string passages.

The most important step forward is that Slow Riot pretty much drops any signs of «dark country» that were so prevalent on the first album, instead opting to take most of its inspiration from two sources — shoegaze and contemporary classical. By doing this, GY!BE make a serious claim to universal rather than regional appeal — and, as it would soon turn out, set the stage for their masterpiece, though at this point it is not yet clear if they are truly capable of one. After all, both tracks set pretty much the same mood and achieve the same goal with the same means (crazy guy rambling on the second track notwithstanding). But even at this point, nobody else in 1999 really had the guts and the means to pull off anything on this grandiose kind of scale.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: F♯A♯∞

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR: F♯A♯∞ (1997)

1) The Dead Flag Blues; 2) East Hastings; 3) Providence.

General verdict: Fifteen Canadian bohemians mixing modern classical, industrial, and ambient with dark country — and creating one of the most convincing, if a bit overdrawn, sentimental goodbyes to the old world.

Curiously, GY!BEʼs debut exists in two completely different versions. The first, shorter one, was originally released on vinyl in August 1997; a year later, as the band had started generating some buzz, a Chicago-based indie label offered to release the record on CD, and this was used as a good pretext to not only extend the running time by about twenty minutes, but also swap around some of the individual sections and, most importantly, completely re-record everything. I have not heard the original vinyl release (and, doubtlessly, there must be people around who would swear about its being superior), but I would like to put off this experience for now, at least until the time when Godspeedyoublackemperology is formally introduced as a new Liberal Arts discipline. Besides, this is GY!BE we are talking about; their whole point is about being big, big, big, so a 40-minute version of a 60-minute album seems almost insulting.

Although F♯A♯∞ is not nearly as ambitious, multi-layered, and intricately crafted as the bandʼs later output, it is still one of those records that has to be heard just once to fully understand what these guys are all about and would go on to be all about. The musical approach embraced here, and then refined and perfected on subsequent albums, is something I could only define as maximalist minimalism — a term that I have so far only encountered applied to interior design, but for lack of a better equivalent, let us drop it here and see what happens. Actually, what does happen when you take a bunch of twenty or so musicians, most of whom are quite far away from virtuoso standards, but are still driven by the desire to create something grand and unforgettable? Thatʼs right — maximalist minimalism happens.

The three tracks into which the CD version has been organized feel seriously more crude and disjointed than the bandʼs future output; and, frankly speaking, some of the sections, particularly the ones that consist of field recording samples, are fillerish and bring the total a bit closer to the insufferable «anything-goes» ideology of performance art. But these are forgivable sins as long as you can develop and maintain the feeling that, essentially, GY!BE know very well what they are doing — taking certain kinds of anti-music (so to speak) developed by the likes of Talk Talk or Slint, expanding them into drawn-out, slowly expanding epics and using them to paint a picture of Earth where life as we know it has pretty much ceased to exist. If anything, F♯A♯∞ could be envisaged as the perfect soundtrack to Cormac McCarthyʼs The Road (which had not even been written yet, but talented people at the border of the millennium tend to think in similar directions).

"The car is on fire, and thereʼs no driver at the wheel, and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides, and a dark wind blows..." When an album opens on a single bent note of synthesized gloom and this kind of not-too-cheerful narration, you could probably expect the music to take a quick turn into either soft Gothic darkness or harsh doom metal. But this is not exactly what those quirky Canadians had in mind. The intro to ʽDead Flag Bluesʼ is essentially a dark country waltz, lightly crossed with baroque elements (represented by the cello pattern, presumably played by Norsola Johnson, though in the case of GY!BE, I am always afraid to associate specific instruments with specific people — Iʼm pretty sure even the album credits might be occasionally wrong, with so many people coming and going all the time). The second section, ʽSlow Moving Trainsʼ, consists of actual sounds of trains over which they slap distorted string samples — so that the moving trains might come across as fuzzy memories or hallucinations rather than the actual experience. ʽThe Cowboyʼ brings back the country blues sound with a vengeance, painting a soundscape dominated by violins and slide guitars; and the ʽOutroʼ brings back the waltz tempo, with soothing xylophones and peaceful violins to end the day.

The singularity of it all lies precisely in the fact that they are establishing a mournful, somber, desolate mood with the same means that are typically used to establish its opposite. The only vocals on the entire track are contained in the introductory narration — which seems to be coming out of a tape recorder, just to confirm the suspicion of nobody left alive. Everything that comes next is the musical equivalent of a vast, desolate panorama where you can still see traces of manʼs activity on this planet, but with man itself thoroughly removed from it. Itʼs like records are still spinning, musical boxes are still grinding, carousels are still rotating, trains are still moving, but in creepy, ghostly, inertia-based ways. It is very important that «solo voices» are almost completely absent from the music — even when a single instrument actually steps out from the overall mass, like the slide guitar in ʽCowboyʼ, it moves carefully and slowly in well-planned and predictable patterns, so as not to spoil the impression of total mechanicity. The end result is a very realistic, believable picture of «soft apocalypse» — heck, just take a stroll through a random American ghost town, and this soundtrack will come very much in handy.

ʽEast Hastingsʼ, coming fresh off the trails of ʽDead Flag Bluesʼ, is not nearly as revelatory in comparison to its predecessor, but the ʽSad Mafiosoʼ part is important in that it contains the first of what would soon become GY!BEʼs trademark crescendos: this one is fairly short and a bit fussy, but already does the job well, with the strings, guitars, and percussion gradually gaining in intensity and speed until the whole thing starts furiously rolling off the hill at hundreds of miles per hour and finally crashes head first into the start of the ʽDrugs In Tokyoʼ section. The parts that surround it, however, are somewhat too minimalistic and field-ish to deserve any special analysis — like, for instance, ʽBlack Helicopterʼ pretty much does exactly the same thing as ʽSlow Moving Trainsʼ, and so on.

ʽProvidenceʼ is essentially more of the same: a quick dialog about the end of the world, a tragic dissonant violin dialog that gives way to a doom-soaked crescendo (ʽDead Methenyʼ), a ghostly vocal interlude that segues into a short bolero-style passage (ʽKicking Horse On Brokenhillʼ), and an industrial noise finale that unexpectedly samples the "where are you going?" line from the Godspell musical — as if there werenʼt enough religious references in the previous narrations already. (If you stick around for a few minutes of silence, there is also a hidden outro track, but it is nothing particularly special — just another stereotypical crescendo).

In the end, it all boils down to the question of whether this debut effort truly deserves its length, and this, in turn, boils down to the question of how one is supposed to experience the experience: sit back and give it your full attention? treat it as background music and let it surreptitiously influence your conscience? smoke a joint and lie under that big shady tree in your back yard? crank it up to eleven and blast it from your living room windows to give all the neighbors a solid chance at an epiphany? The first of these approaches would not be very productive, because at this point, the band has not yet properly mastered all the fifty shades of post-rock that would appear on their subsequent releases; any of the other three, however, might be quite promising in comparison.

Overall, since this is easily the single most «roots-influenced» recording this band ever made, I think that the people who could prefer it over their later, more heavily acclaimed releases, are those who have a prior penchant for rustic Americana, with the emphasis on the ʽrustʼ in ʽrusticʼ, if you see what I mean. None of these end-of-the-world references really work in turning F♯A♯∞ into a properly cosmic-psychedelic experience, but this is not necessarily a flaw: sometimes contemplating a broken-down vehicle rotting away in some gutter can put you in a much more eschatological frame of mind than reading the Book of Revelation, and this is quite comparable with the effect that these softly sad sonic panoramas set out to produce. Where a contemporary masterpiece like OK Computer would lament the oncoming dehumanization of society, F♯A♯∞ is, instead, a lengthy dirge for the depopulation of empty spaces — both Radiohead and GY!BE, then, use progressive elements to complain about the side effects of progress, but do so from different angles and in vastly different ways. And, of course, OK Computer is a far more accessible (since it is song-oriented) record, but still, even with all its flaws (such as too many field samples in place of more melodies), feel free to add F♯A♯∞ to the list of cool, serious, thought-provoking, innovative late-Nineties releases that gave this short period of music-making a distinct face, the likes of which — who knows? — we might not be seeing again until the year 3000 appears on the horizon.