It is rare in today's music climate to have a record that embraces both sonic power and quiet beauty. With the double disc Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven, Montreal's Godspeed You Black Emperor! has created an album of emotional power that stems from a roller-coaster ride of powerful highs and somber lows.
Godspeed you black emperor!
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven
Kranky Records
|
Over the course of four songs, each about 20 minutes long, Godspeed You Black Emperor! crafts a musical landscape with the use of strings, percussion, guitars, horns and a couple of recorded narratives. The music is a wonderful mixture of the classical and the modern, usually within the course of the same song.
Lift Your Skinny Fists opens with the glorious pastoral "Storm," which is divided into three clear movements. The first movement of "Storm" begins with a muted trumpet quietly resonating in the background as the song slowly adds chiming guitars and sweet strings. After all the instruments are introduced into mix, the song changes intensity as the strings swell, the guitar chiming becomes distorted, and a thundering drum and bass line underlines everything.
The rest of the movement is about layering crescendo upon crescendo. The movement reaches one plateau after another until it ends in an almost religious frenzy of instrument interplay. And this is only the first movement of the first song.
The rest of the songs on the album are expansions of the ideas that were introduced in the first movement of "Storm." "Static" is an exploration of sparse territories, while "Sleep" begins with a narrative about how people used to sleep on the beach of Coney Island before waves of feedback rip through the song. The album ends on a quiet note with the stirring "Antennas to Heavens."
This album isn't necessarily easy to absorb on a purely intellectual level, but on an emotional level, it quickly resonates. While it might not be for everyone, Lift Your Skinny Fists is definitely one of the most powerful albums that will come out this year.
