A capacidade dos Godspeed You Black Emperor! para nos surpreender é quase infinita. As influências são muitas: dos Sonic Youth aos Swans, de Michael Nyman a John Cage.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor (formerly Godspeed You Black Emperor!) is a Canadian post-rock band based in Montreal, Quebec. Formed in 1994, the ensemble have been quite influential in its respective genre, with bands from as far as Hong Kong citing them as influences in their musical work. Working on a near symphonic scale, the nine-piece group has been known to create wide dynamic ranges, unique use of instrumentation and sounds, large songs that are composed almost classically with multiple movements within itself, and engrossing use of art and visuals in both their album packaging and live performances.
They took their name from God Speed You! Black Emperor, a little known 1976 Japanese black-and-white documentary by director Mitsuo Yanagimachi, which follows the exploits of a Japanese biker gang, the Black Emperors. The band is most commonly classified as post-rock, but they exist outside any established scene and take influences from a range of styles including progressive rock, punk, classical music and avant-garde. Each record consists of a few fairly long tracks (mostly between 15 and 25 minutes), divided into "movements" which are sometimes specified in the record sleeve.
The band formed around 1993 with three members, but its lineup has changed frequently. The band has had as many as fifteen members at one time, but has tended to settle down to a group of nine. The instruments played vary with the lineup, but the music tends to be based around electric and bass guitars, strings and a percussion section. Other instruments such as the Glockenspiel and the French horn make more occasional appearances. The music on some of their records is accompanied by spoken samples recorded by the band across North America, including an apocalyptic street preacher from Vancouver, BC Canada, an announcement at a gas station, and a group of children talking and singing in French. Most of the members are also anarchists, and their music has strong political overtones.
The band members have in the past been reluctant to go in for the traditional self-publicising interviews, and have openly expressed their distaste for the mainstream, corporation-owned music industry. This has given them a reputation as shadowy, even anti-social figures, and not a great deal is known about them personally. They did, however, become considerably more widely known after appearing on the cover of British music magazine the NME in 1999.
Cover to the July 24 1999 issue of NME.The member who interacts with the press the most is Efrim Menuck, and for this reason he is sometimes presented as a front-man. However, he has strongly repudiated this label.
Members of the group have formed a number of side-projects, including A Silver Mt. Zion, Fly Pan Am and Set Fire to Flames. The band contributed the song "East Hastings" from their debut album to the soundtrack of the UK film 28 Days Later, although it is only featured in the film and not on the soundtrack available for purchase due to the track in its entirety lasting for more than 15 minutes.
The band released the CD versions of its first two albums on the Kranky record label, with the LPs being published by Constellation Records; the contract with Kranky having run out, both the LP and the CD of Yanqui U.X.O. were produced by Constellation.
In 2004, long-time guitarist Roger-Tellier Craig left the band on amicable terms to devote more time to Fly Pan Am.
The band has often played an unrecorded song entitled "Albanian" when touring. Efrim has said that when the band reforms they will record it for their next release. Another unreleased song, "Gamelan," may also be recorded. However, due to the band's open taping policy, both these songs are available as high quality audience recordings. It has frequently been the case, in fact, that new material is released through the fans before its official recording.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor announced an indefinite hiatus in the summer of 2003, and have no plans to reconvene in the immediate future. In a recent radio interview Constellation Records co-founder Don confirmed that the band is likely to remain inactive in 2006.
Rather strangely, the group was one time misconstrued as being a band of terrorists [1]. After stopping at a local Sinclair gas station in the small town of Ardmore, Oklahoma, for fuel during their 2003 tour of the United States, the station attendant working that day believed the group of Canadians to be terrorists and passed a note to another customer also getting fuel to call the police. When the local police appeared, the group was held until they could be questioned by the FBI. When no incriminating evidence was found in their various vehicles and background checks were run, the ensemble was released from custody and continued on their way to their next show in St. Louis, Missouri. Interestingly, Efrim Menuck later spoke to the crowd about what happened to them during their appearance in Missouri and said, if they were of any other race than white, they would have been detained much longer than they were originally, hinting heavily towards the suspicion of racism in the police force. The incident was mentioned in Michael Moore's book, Dude, Where's My Country?.
in : Wikipédia
Discografia:
F#a#
Os Godspeed You Black Emperor!, banda canadiana, criaram na minha opinião uma das mais importantes obras dos anos noventa. F#a# editado em 1997 primeiro em cassete e depois em 1998 em vinil e em CD é considerado um dos melhores exemplos do pos-rock por uns, ou, do rock progressivo. Os dois conceitos são demasiado abstractos e de pouca relevância neste momento. Os GYBE! Utilizam normalmente uma construção por camadas que estruturam ideias conceptuais, adicionando progressivamente estratos até atingir a explosão sonora perto do final decrescendo em seguida para criar a preparação da música seguinte.
O álbum inicia com uma magnífica suite The Dead Flag Blues com um impressionante monologo que vem adicionar um ambiente dramático à atmosfera negra da música. Segue-se East Hastings que começa com o lento avançar de um comboio em início de viagem e termina com um dos momentos sonoros mais arrepiantes do disco. Movimento seguinte, Providence, uma das melhores músicas do álbum onde um pregador faz o seu discurso impressionante.
Este disco deve ser ouvido como um todo e não apenas como músicas individuais, e, mesmo não sendo um disco de fácil audição, sobretudo devido aos momentos de tenção/atenção, facilmente cativa quem o ouve pela primeira vez. Com F#a# os GYBE!, criaram um estilo que desenvolveram até à exaustão nos discos seguintes, nomeadamente em Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven de 2000 e Yanqui U.X.O. de 2002. De qualquer forma, os GYBE! criaram o primeiro grande disco pos-rock ainda antes da grande onda que veio a seguir. Até a capa é em cartão…
Mp3:
http://www.brainwashed.com/common/sounds/mp3/godspeed_you_black_emperor-dead_flag_blues_intro.mp3
http://www.brainwashed.com/common/sounds/mp3/godspeed_you_black_emperor-drugs_in_tokyo.mp3
http://www.brainwashed.com/common/sounds/mp3/godspeed_you_black_emperor-dead_metheny.mp3
in: http://sonsdemusica.blogspot.com
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven
That said, the Canadian nontet's Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven is a massive, achingly beautiful work, alternately elegiac and ferocious. However, Lift plays like an oddly transitional album: much of the first disc presents a refinement of the sound that crystallized on 1999's Slow Riot EP, while the second disc flirts with moments of vertiginous shoegazing, looser rock drumming and reckless crescendos of unalloyed noise. Succinctly, the first disc is easily continuous with their earlier work; the second disc might just be the future. The disparity is immediately striking.
This is not to suggest that the first disc is not wonderful-- it is, but mostly as a cultivation of ideas and sounds embedded in F#A#oo or Slow Riot. The waltz-like grace of the opening part of "Storm" (titled "Levez Vos Skinny Fists Comme Antennas to Heaven") is dominated by rising cello and violin which evolve, with the addition of guitars and martial drum taps, into a loud triumphal procession. Blaring trumpets seem to announce the advent of some head of state, and the whole affair proceeds with military discipline and measured effect. The violent explosion never comes: the parade merely approaches and recedes.
Slow Riot for a new zero kanada
On their towering debut, F#A#oo, the Montreal-based nine-piece Godspeed You Black Emperor! summed up enough fin-de-siecle dread in their instrumental compositions to put most coffeehouse lyricists in a vortex of public shame. Moody, tense, and harrowing, it was one of the best records released anywhere-- the kind of achievement that frustrates the hybrid characterizations that makes writing record reviews so damn easy. Rachel's meets Mogwai? Labradford meets Glenn Branca? Sonic Youth meets yo' mama after a coke binge? You see how difficult it is. Forget these stupid comparisons. It was a great record, and you'd do well to pick it up.
Whereas F#A#oo was a mostly gorgeous and somber affair, the Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP finds the nontet exploring the limits of out-and-out bombast. Utilizing the three spaced-out guitars, two basses, cello, violin, xylophone, and two drummers, this two-track offering is louder and more muscular than the band's debut. Both tracks (totalling 30 minutes) begin with menacing drones before slowly building up into dense, sprawling sections, which then become pummeling sonic attacks. Eventually, they lead into unparalleled moments of audio assault, before dispersing into quiet codas.
Whatever Godspeed has sacrificed in terms of melodic mood here is throttled by the ridiculously intense walls of melodic sound they summon throughout the record. Guitars and violins soar, drums crash accordingly, basses chug along, and people get fucking hurt. If, to talk in guitarist-speak, there is a pedal for "intense," Godspeed You Black Emperor! have stomped it to bits. Music this ambitious almost needs to be heard on a different kind of stereo. Have I said enough?
All this, of course, leaves one wondering what they'll do next. Over the course of two records, these guys have shown their masterful grasp of both quiet menace and full-throttle rackets. One can hope (and with some justification, expect) that their next recording will not render them victims of their own excellence.
Yanqui UXO
You know what I miss? I miss political rock music. Probably it's out there and I'm looking in all the wrong places. But I know this: Indie rock, always one of the great dissenting voices of American (and British) underground media, has gone virtually silent. In the 1980s, this music was rife with anti-government sentiment, from Black Flag to The Minutemen to Gang of Four to The Dead Kennedys to Elvis Costello. But with the ushering in of ambivalent slacker-rock, political messages became passé and we grew steadily more tolerant of Washington's silent plots. Conspiracy theories soon became kitsch, and now, in the aftermath of X-Files geekdom and September 11th pacifism, there are few better ways to get hipster eyes rolling than by questioning authority. What perfect timing: We've lethargically accepted that Washington is brutally malevolent just as our most wicked administration yet has come to power.
Yay, the most political rock band going right now is Canadian! Thanks, America. Granted, their message is pretty ham-fisted, what with those didactic, overbearing manifestos and ominous woodcuts of skull-faced forefathers chopping off peoples' hands. But Godspeed is at least putting forth some kind of an effort, which is more than can be said for most. I mean, I dig a lot of music, and songs about our girlfriends and our scenes and hating our parents are fine-- sometimes great, even transcendent. But when that's all there is, we have a problem.
So, upfront, that's why I respect Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I just wish their approach was more effective. For one, they're an instrumental band whose political message is carried out through vague and overwrought packaging which merely hints at a greater "something." And their latest offering, Yanqui U.X.O., is vague as ever. We're told that "09-15-00", one of the album's song titles, "is ariel sharon surrounded by 1,000 israeli soldiers marching on al-haram ash-sharif& provoking another intifada." How? The music is simple atmospheric orchestration with no agenda of its own, and as easily reflects a DMV waitroom as Palestinian uprising. And on the back of the sleeve, we're treated to a six-degrees-of-bomb-makers, where Tomahawk cruise missile manufacturers Raytheon Industries are traced, through a twisted labyrinth of corporations to the recording industry's major labels. Briefly: Just because you have a friend who knows an auto mechanic who worked on a car owned by a guy who was the gaffer on the set of She's Having a Baby does not mean you know Kevin Bacon.
Unfortunately, Yanqui's tenebrous finger-pointing isn't its only shortcoming. The band has taken its naysayers' gripes to heart and done away with those moody vocal snippets that not only hinted at deeper protest, but also jolted you awake just as your mind began to wander. And where the hell is the undercurrent? The two discs of 2000's Lift Your Skinny Fists used Godspeed's sweeping, emotional übersuites as a basic centerpiece to the bizarre ambient textures and noise projects which backed them. Meanwhile, Yanqui U.X.O. strips the group to their essentials which, as it just so happens, are not quite essential enough. Ideas are scarce, too-- where Skinny Fists would erupt without warning into a scorching Satriani-esque solo ("Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-Way"), the tracks on Yanqui are content to continue building to bored, satiated endings we can see coming 20 minutes in advance. Couldn't we have some venting? Are we frustrated or just dramatic?
Worse: The record is consumed by a painfully glacial pace. Each song plods endlessly onward toward an inevitable conclusion with no revelation in store for the poor listener, who can only endure these disc-filling five tracks in the hopes that, maybe, just maybe, that one glorious moment will arrive and redeem the interminable wait with a display of power so towering and majestic that it in itself will be a $12 experience. It doesn't. Once, at the end of "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls," the band comes close with a triumphant burst of cinematic melody and Efrim's wailing screwdriver'd guitar. The quarter-hour denouement that precedes it is a long road to travel, though, and with this record's production difficulties, you're slogging through the mud every step of the way.
in: pitchforkmedia
Informação detalhada para quem não conhece, porque acho que toda a gente deve ouvir e conhecer!
Foi o melhor concerto que assisti até hoje, uma experiência para além de qualquer palavra ou critica.
Será que há aqui mais fans?
, mas para me redimir já trouxe o CD com os àlbuns para ouvir aqui no trabalho.
