F*A* #

Godspeed You Black Emperor are a great band from Montréal, with mostly instrumental tracks, featuring about 10 people (two percussionists, three guitarists, cello, violin, tape recorder and glockenspiel players). Their music is described as post-rock but it's more than that, and difficult to be compared with anything else.
Godspeed's first album can maybe remind you of Mogwai or the Dirty Three, but it's far better indeed. There is only one track divided intoseveral different tracks, along over 60 minutes. An extraordinary spiral of violins, guitars and apocalyptic samples growing louder and louder.
This is a brilliant album, quite unlike anything I have ever heard. I'm sure I'll listen to this music in a thirty years time with the same enthusiastic pleasure. This music will last forever…
 

Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada

This second album of Godspeed You Black Emperor is as brilliant as the first one and more rythmic. For like last year's album "f*a*#", this one is pure emotional documentary, replacing grainy super-8 with violin and glockenspiel, ditching facts and statistics for the rage of a man taped on a street in Providence. Providence, of all places. "For thus saith the Lord: The whole land shall be desolate yet I will not make a full end," read the apocalyptic sleevenotes, taken from Jeremiah. "To attack someone's mind is a social disorder," says Blase Bailey Finnegan III, field recording and namesake of the second and final track on this record. For in Godspeed's worldview, everyone's a marginal prophet.

Words, though, are beside the point - their lexicon of faith, misery, hope and tenacity is written in every glockenspiel chime, in each intimate drone, in the build and fade and build. Few words doesn't mean nothing to say, and whether the fierce stringed defiance of 'Moya' or the ectoplasmic tape static of 'BBF3', they might sometimes go quiet, but they're not going anywhere gently.

It's impossibly beautiful music for plain impossible times. Yes, we are a long way from home. But here, in this low and lovely noise, is a place to keep you warm.

Victoria Segal

Informations : http://www.brainwashed.com/godspeed
label : Kranky