Godspeed You! Black Emperor : NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD

G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!, in some ways, was the album Godspeed You! Black Emperor were destined to make. It came roughly a year into the pandemic when the world, for a brief, hyperbolic moment, felt like it could end, if not in an apocalypse, then in a locked-down state. Of course the Canadian post-rock band behind the “soundtrack to the end of the world” and the overt government critique in “BBF3” would release a work emblematic of both the privileged malaise of the lockdown and the harrowing reality of the pandemic. They built upon the foundation set in the ’90s that made their music life-altering while integrating their rapid artistic developments of the 2010s for a record that not only defined the feel of the pandemic—“crushing yet vulnerable” as Ian MacPhee wrote on Treble—but served as a culmination of their career.
This leaves their latest offering, NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD, in a strange crater. Godspeed have put their political thoughts right in the title, so it’s not that they’re less inspired. Rather, it’s as if they are disenchanted with music’s purpose in the face of the rising death toll due to Israel’s ongoing attacks on the people in Gaza (the number of which is even higher now than it was when the band chose the album’s title). Listen to how tired they sound on “SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS.” The instruments unwind like bones popping and cracking in the morning, and although they loosely echo the tonality on Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, they lack its warmth. It’s not for a paltry performance; seemingly, the Montreal group elected to abdicate the warmth and spirit that once elevated their material because, in this context, there is no warmth.
It’s worth noting that Godspeed’s best music has been transcendental while their worst has never sunk below being enjoyable. Within the post-rock genre, they’re one of the most eager groups to experiment and expand without disrupting their core. Look at their track record after their comeback; embracing drone as a major outlet rather than a minor feature (Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!), embracing more discrete rock tropes (Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress), and embracing brevity as a guiding principle (Luceferian Towers). They’ve always moved forward, even if their finished releases occasionally lacked vigor.
NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD, however, is both muted and iterative. Whether or not this is a direct reaction to Gaza is unclear, as here’s what the band’s statement laid out; there’s a structural indifference to the suffering of Palestinians, the future looks like shit, and the band wrote and recorded NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD together. The record lacks the large-scale developments and massive emotional leveraging of Godspeed’s best works, playing comfortably as if that’s all music can do in light of the current situation. When the powers that be are complicit in such atrocities, what can a recording accomplish?
That’s a question Godspeed do not explicitly answer, though it’s not out of cowardice. Fortunately, it doesn’t affect that, despite the lack of growth or stakes, they still sound great. Even without their crescendos, they play warbly, imperfect post-rock that connects to their scrappy art kid roots. Remember, they aren’t technical wizards, they are the potheads who dropped out of school. They’ve retained an everyman approach to post-rock because they’ve stuck to their DIY ethos, both a comfort for the listener who engages with that rhetoric and a ceiling that keeps them rough around the edges. They conjure tracks like “RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD” casually, which is quite the feat considering it’s both a great cut and a treatise on why the Godspeed formula succeeds. Elsewhere, “BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL” is a rugged recording of string instruments. It’s an aimless mood piece that leads into the larger “PALE SPECTOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS” yet holds its own due to its intriguing textures. It’s incidental but proves that Godspeed have still not found a way to be boring.
Yet there’s a gap that must be filled that Godspeed did not. It’s not as if they’re xeroxing their previous work, nor is any of this music uninspired. Perhaps it’s that this protest music reaches its limits when there are videos of rocket strikes that hit social media feeds minutes after happening in real time. It appears that Godspeed has chosen to simply play music, for better and worse. Though NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD is not as much of a dropoff as Yanqui U.X.O was after Lift Your Skinny Fists, its conclusion is similar; Godspeed’s magic is not unlimited.
Label: Constellation
Year: 2024
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Colin Dempsey is a Toronto-based writer with publications at Consequence, Invisible Oranges, Spectrum Culture, and more. There will always be more to write about, and he wants to cover it all.