Godspeed You Black Emperor!: Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

Now, on Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, Godspeed sifts through its own rubble to see if there's anything worth salvaging. And there's a lot to sift through: the album's four tracks (each subdivided into individually titled sections) span two CDs for a total of nearly 90 minutes. Sometimes the band turns up a dusty treasure, like the simple guitar line that opens the album. Godspeed brushes it off, adds horns, strings, drums, and more guitars, and turns it into a crashing epic that makes you want to lift your skinny fist in triumphant approval. It's the closest thing a group that peppers its liner notes with anti-nationalist rhetoric like "we dedicate [this recording] to every prisoner in the world" could ever come to recording an anthem.

Then again, sometimes the rubble turns out to be just that. "Terrible Canyons of Static" and "Deathkamp Drone" sound like their titles. But the noise always ends up being more evocative than grating, and a few simple notes played over the top can render it infinitely hopeful or infinitely sad.

As the album progresses, the line blurs between the pounding grandeur of the self-titled opener and the disquieting metallic clang of tracks like "+ the Buildings They are Sleeping Now." Songs stew in swirling strings and atmospherics, emerge briefly as Morricone-esque instrumentals, and then sink back into a primordial soup of sound. Even the field recordings go from the overt paranoia of "Welcome to Barco AM/PM," a convenience store announcement warning customers not to talk to solicitors, to the ethereal "Glockenspiel Duet Recorded on a Campground in Rhinebeck, N.Y.," a chiming melody muffled by tape noise and children speaking French. In the end, Lift Yr. Skinny Fists resolves with "Antennas to Heaven," a perfect combination of noise and music. As a heartbreaking progression of delayed guitar chords reverberates over a distant wail that is half bagpipe and half banshee, it seems that Godspeed has discovered that the rubble itself is beautiful and that there's no need to look any further. (Kranky)

—Eliot Rose

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