By now you can expect a few things when a new Godspeed You! Black Emperor record comes out. Long, alternately bleak and hopeful instrumental compositions, an anarchical sense of outrage with the established order and pensive, evocative album art are just a few hallmarks of this nine-piece band that has long since established itself as a colossus of post-rock.

Right away, “Luciferian Towers” appears different. Its two major pieces, “Bosses Hang” and “Anthem for No State,” are broken into three discrete, self-contained parts each, and it’s the group’s first album with text on the cover. These aesthetic differences foretell more fundamental change, as the album strikes a more hopeful note than listeners may expect after 2015’s dark, drone-fueled “Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress.” A question, then: Why would a band usually so politically attuned and fueled by indignation release such an album in 2017?

The first track, “Undoing a Luciferian Towers,” opens uneasy and strained, but with the perseverance of the broken its horns and warbling strings eventually give way to a riff as empowered as anything the band has produced. “Bosses Hang,” pregnant with constant activity, stands among the group’s best work. It’s never content to sit still in pensive melancholy, and every moment has the sense of building to something greater, as indeed they do when the track’s opening riff comes thundering triumphantly back at the finale.

After this display the band catches their breath on the relentlessly glittering “Fam/Famine,” but as they strike up for “Anthem for No State” it feels like their earlier enthusiasm has waned. For its first two parts it struggles to get off the ground, and from that stagnation the final part opens amid a sort of panic. But when Sophie Trudeau’s violin comes in at the end, it enters exultant and defiant, resolving this track that has been as much a contradiction in terms as its title.

While “Luciferian Towers” has its darker moments, a sense of optimism constantly underlays it. This is somewhat inexplicable, and even frustrating at first, given the band’s history and today’s political reality. When the album was released, it was accompanied by a list of “grand demands.” Among these are “an end to borders” and that “the expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again.” Admirable goals, but where, you might ask, are they to be felt in the music?

It would be easy enough to argue that Godspeed have grown soft. Perhaps this is what happens when a band, even one as anti-establishment as GY!BE, enjoys commercial and critical success for over two decades. Perhaps this is an inevitable result of its members growing older and, as the press release has it, “raising dogs and children” and generally getting on with life. Just what happens when an anarchist reaches middle age? But “Luciferian Towers” doesn’t feel like that. It feels as earnest and essential as anything the band has ever made.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor have always been a group for the downtrodden and dispossessed. From their home in Montréal they have been the ones to cry out in rage at the human costs of an impersonal capitalism run amok. Their music has been the sound of homeless people proclaiming the end times on their street corners under the harsh glint of sunlight reflecting off the metal and glass of skyscrapers. But it has always held out hope for the possibility of redemption through destruction. If they no longer tell us outright that the car is on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel, if the bleakness that infected their earlier music is now only to be found framing it, it is so out of necessity. If on “Luciferian Towers” hope overshadows despair, it is only because that despair is no longer sustainable.

 

 

Contact Damon French at damonf ‘at’ stanford.edu.