In March 2003, a small-town gas station owner became suspicious of two black, graffiti-spattered vans and the herd of exhausted, haggard musicians—yards of grizzled beard between them—who rolled into his property. The United States was then one-week-deep into the second war in Iraq, and it was all too clear to this gentleman that he was dealing with terrorists. Oklahoma FBI were contacted and ultimately discovered a trove of anarchist literature inside one of the vans (literature which was and still is available at the band’s merch tables). Everyone was detained and interrogated and—who knows?—maybe water-boarded.
The incident was my first exposure to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. And I quickly became their over-converted convert, devouring the records, researching the various side projects, and devising a scheme to have myself shipped (in a large cardboard box) to the band’s recording/rehearsal/living cooperative, Hotel2Tango, which they founded in 1995 in their hometown of Montreal. I’d had little prior exposure (excepting Mogwai) to so-called post-rock—an annoyingly evasive term which, as musical genre, still seems to lend itself more to confusion than to clarity. But I got lucky on my first try with GSY!BE, everything clicked and made sense: never had I encountered such an overwhelming, oceanic sound, like a force of nature or some experimental apocalypse. All that fluff about subverting the usual conventions of rock music and fusing their disfigured remains with classical compositional structures and sheer noise, wasn’t just fluff. I had to see them perform live, at once…
Then, as if by cruel coincidence, GSY!BE chose just this moment in time to go on creative hiatus—one that would last the better of twelve years. I’ve been crying myself to sleep and wetting the bed ever since.
Until now!
(This might be a good time to throw a little cold water on the extent of my enthusiasm for the group’s recent output, especially Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress (2015), which punches nowhere near the weight of latter-day gems like Yanqui U.X.O (2002) or Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000). Something is absent and I’m not articulate enough to pin it down, so I won’t try; but I will say that since their return to the game three years ago GSY!BE has struggled to tap the same vein of rich creativity that guided their earlier efforts. Period. The end. I wish to go on loving them and proclaiming their good-ness now.
So, this show, right now, feels long overdue. And I’m slightly drunk with reverential awe (and whiskey) to at last be sharing oxygen with the undisputed overlords of deconstructed post-rock symphony.
Phoenix’s Crescent Ballroom on February 6th is buzzing at full capacity (truly, the fullest I’ve seen yet), and nothing of the stage or its inhabitants is visible over the limitless heads of my fellow cattle—just a projection screen on the wall with the word “HOPE” overexposed and flickering against spinning chiaroscuro frames. A pair of guitars are layering thick sonic textures atop one another such that the cumulative vibration of distortion feels less like music and more like an actual building, a solid structure. An ominous drumbeat creeps undetected into the mix and the collective volume rises; more melodies fugue around one another with increasing violence; strains of tension swell and linger while a delay-rich violin hangs a single, plaintive note high in the air.
All eight musicians are dialed into a slow, unsettling drone whose individual attributes have all fallen away and become hot and molten—like the industrial churn of steel being forged—followed by unbroken minutes of atonal sludge and manipulated feedback. Black-and-white field footage is projected onto the wall: a nuclear test, over and over, and houses collapsing or combusting. When the dirge-like procession of thick sonic tension reaches its bursting point, the inevitable release washes over all of us speechless cows with the equivalent musical force of a hurricane or any natural disaster.
And it’s over now. We can still feel the tectonic plates shifting and colliding under our feet as the depressingly bright house lights rise.
Just getting myself into the same room with GSY!BE has proven to be one of the more vexing tasks of the past decade of this life: I’m so glad it happened, I’m so glad it’s over.
Good night. Pleasant tomorrow.
