Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

A Godspeed You Black Emperor album is no casual affair. The Montreal-based, all-instrumental collective -- sometimes eight members, sometimes more -- has most of the elements it needs to execute total, heart-and-soul, control-freak art rock: devoted fans; a supportive record label; cloistered, obsessive concepts; and compositional skill. But the last part is its weakest link. Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, a double disc and the band's second album, is the sound of ambition that's a few miles ahead of resources. It's frequently orchestral, though without the tense microtonal harmonies of Glenn Branca's symphonies, one of the band's clear inspirations. The two long tracks on each disc of Lift Your Skinny Fists are presented as suites; typical sections build on short, repeated themes from bass, guitar or violin that can approach the dull, goopy gloom of black metal before the full instrumentation piles on and brings the track slowly, slowly, to its inevitable Dionysian ascension and cresting. In between the structured themes are sound-art sequences: cymbal-scraping, clouds of ringing guitar tones and -- the group's stock in trade -- voices of North American flotsam culture such as staticky radio preachers, anti-theft warnings over convenience-store PAs and an old man's shaggy-dog remembrance of growing up in Coney Island. It's brilliantly calculated: The combination of celestial music and field recordings of the lost arrives at a tone of redemption for all souls -- similar to what you feel at the end of a film like Mike Leigh's Naked or a Hubert Selby Jr. novel. This time, though, the band's minimalism is only by default: The music is careful and structured, but the material and orchestral writing remain fairly one-dimensional. (RS 853)

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