ALBUM REVIEW: G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! – Godspeed You! Black Emperor

‘Political art’ is something of a misnomer. Any and all artwork is conditioned by the circumstances in which it is created. Certainly, an artwork’s relation to discourse can be more or less direct – clearly, CRASS are more political than CREAM – but when an artist presents their work as apolitical, they’re being naïve. Not every album needs to be a manifesto. An art world preoccupied with political discourse would be deeply impoverished. Many artists, in good faith, refrain from inculcating their work with their own political objectives to avoid alienating their audience in this way – whether we were to agree with them or not. Some artists, however, wear the garb of ‘the apolitical’ to avoid drawing attention to their distasteful views, but audiences are notoriously skilful in detecting and outing such imposters: apolitical pretenders rarely survive scrutiny. For their part, GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR have never shied away from making their politics known.

Their revolutionary ethos is writ large in their catalogue. The obverse artwork for the Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada EP, for instance, features an instructional diagram for the manufacture of a Molotov cocktail, while the titular interviewee heard on BBF3 delivers a plagiarised sermon on the corruption of government (taken from Blaze Bayley’s lyrics for the IRON MAIDEN track Virus, of all places). The liner notes of Yanqui U.X.O., meanwhile, detail financial connections between major record labels and the military industrial complex. In the course of their career, GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR have creatively reconfigured the LP format – music, artwork, liner notes, and even messages etched into the runout groove – as a means to deliver their political agenda.

Political messaging is nothing new in modern music, but GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR have certainly elevated it beyond the pierced-tongue-lashing of your average punk act. The Montreal collective are best known as landscape artists who render in sound the anxiety and torment of post-industrial society’s death throes. Their early work is beyond bleak; F#A#∞ and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven are the jaded revelations of civilization’s collapse which, while sublime, are also entirely without hope. That forlorn outlook has since changed. 2017’s Luciferian Towers was issued alongside a list of demands:  “an end to foreign invasions,” “an end to borders,” “the total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex,” “healthcare, house, food and water acknowledged as an inalienable human right,” and that “the expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again.” This isn’t the despondent lyricism of youth, but the wilful pragmatism of maturity.

That force of intent was matched by a record which inspires courage and optimism. GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR adapted their chamber-punk style for new purposes. There is a brightness permeating Luciferian Towers: the shimmering clamour for reform. Centrepieces Bosses Hang and Anthem For No State, both delivered in three movements, each conclude in an atmosphere of exalted freedom and unbridled joy. The ensemble had finally turned their back on the negativity of critique, and come to embrace the visceral possibility of affecting change. As we approached the end of 2021’s first quarter – bewildered, exhausted and above all isolated – Constellation Records announced the arrival of G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! Our question was: had the preceding four years, with all their tumult and misery, wounded their newfound optimism?

Early signs indicated a strengthened resolve. Like its predecessor, G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! is issued alongside a list of demands: “empty the prisons,” “take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise,” “end the forever wars and all other forms of imperialism,” and “tax the rich until they’re impoverished.” It’s tempting to draw out the contradictions here, but the sentiment is clear all the same. “This record is about all of us waiting for the end,” they write, “all current forms of governance are failed. This record is about all of us waiting for the beginning.” More than the demands they are making, it’s clear that this record is occasioned by the frustration and ennui which are now palpable to us all.

Before the stylus so much as touches the record, you’ll notice that G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!  playfully eschews convention. The album is cut into two discs, a 12” containing sides A and 3 and a 10” with B and 4, meaning that the procedure for hearing this album in its entirety involves an unwieldy trio of disc changes. Still, that’s all the more opportunity to examine William Schmiechen’s artwork: an assortment of half-tone illustrations, each subtly seditious in their own way. The cluster bombs and chemical grenades sit uneasily alongside the photographic inner sleeves, which evoke natural beauty as well as the collective’s camera-shy humanity. Static, noise and the indistinct chitter-chatter of number stations open G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!, which promises to be an album of mixed signals.

A Military Alphabet (five eyes all blind) (4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz) / Job’s Lament / First of the Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY) marks a return to the side-long movement-based song structure GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR made their trademark before returning from hiatus. This is a reprise of their classic sound: bleak and beautiful post-rock serenades written to an unjust and dying world. All the same, there is potency here: not the dizzying brightness of Luciferian Towers, but a prelude to it. It’s tempting to romanticise any group’s earliest work – fans and critics alike are guilty of this – and it would be easy to overlook how far GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR have grown as songwriters and composers. Fire At Static Valley could have become one of the throwaway interludes which blighted ALLELUJAH! DON’T BEND! ASCEND! but instead embodies a newfound focus.

The second sequence “GOVERNMENT CAME” (9980.0kHz 3617.1kHz 4521.0 kHz) / Cliffs Gaze / cliffs’ gaze at empty waters’ rise / ASHES TO SEA or NEARER TO THEE reprises motifs from the first, but there is far more darkness and disillusionment to be found here: ravishing loneliness and despair reminiscent of their work on F#A#∞.  Soaring strings and the undulating rock rhythm climb and coalesce, before reaching an ambiguous plateau. This is the pregnant silence where ideas gestate. Just as all the misery and resignation sets in, GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR deliver a triumphant refrain in the closing movement, which builds to an overflowing and joyous conclusion; the busyness and excitement of emancipation finally arrives. The ecstasy and intensity of the conclusion is momentous, and resonates throughout the quiet sincerity of outro piece OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN (for D.H.)

This is GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR’s most complete and musically accomplished record to date. They have tempered the burgeoning hope of Luciferian Towers with their traditional proclivity for all things bleak, and the result is as engaging as it is prescient. The depth and range of sentiment explored here lends G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! a truly cinematic quality, which is enhanced by compositional pacing and aesthetic sampling. They have not allowed the urgency of their political objectives to obscure their craft; this is clamouring for emancipation as it is heard as much as it is said.  As promised, this is a soundtrack to the end and to the beginning.

Rating: 9/10

G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! is out now via Constellation Records. 

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