Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven

Jeremiah is Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s prophet. The Hebrew emblazoned in dirty copper on the cover of their Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP belongs to him: tohu-va-bohu, it reads: void and waste. The lengthy passage on the sleeve of that EP is lifted from his book. Blase Bailey Finnegan III, the Providence street preacher whose rantings appear on the two first Godspeed You Black Emperor! releases, is his avatar. The music of Godspeed, for all its bombast and lament, extends Jeremiah's ministry into a new millennium. Preaching in a vocabulary drawn from Boston hardcore, in a spidery array of radical leftist rhetoric, Godspeed You Black Emperor! have delivered a blistering (albeit politically imprecise) homily on the new world order.

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.

The second part, "Gathering Storm," begins in entwined guitars: one bowed, one screwdrivered, one gently plucked. With the entrance of the cello, violin and rumbling toms, the guitars begin to shriek in distortion. The effect is amped-up slowcore sludge that's all tension and no release, merely dissipation and noise reminiscent of Cale-era Velvet Underground performances. Seven minutes later, "Cancer Towers on the Holy Road Hi-Way" ends the track in crushing paranoia with locomotive percussion thundering toward breakdown. (It is also Jeremiah who predicted that destruction would come from the North.)

The second track, "Static," opens with a looped recording of a supermarket welcome message, giving way to indecipherable megaphone vitriol. Sparse piano and drone frames the static-drenched field recordings with mournful effect. "Chart #3" is treated guitar drone and distant buzzing similar to records released by the Fatalists or James Plotkin. Piercing static and high frequency ambient yields to the monologue of a fringe Christian preacher. "When you see the face of God," he intones, "you will die and there will be nothing left of you, except the god-man, the god-woman, the heavenly man, the heavenly women...," girded by skeletal string arrangements.

Near the end of the first disc, "World Police and Friendly Fires" initially reminds me of Erik Frielander's Watchman compositions, and his work with Greg Feldman on John Zorn's Bar Kokhba. Eventually, however, "World Police" erupts into thick, layered drone rock (think the Dirty Three, but less dispersed) that sounds like a heavy metal riff slowed to quarter-speed and suddenly accelerated into wailing guitars and slashing strings. It is, I think, the first disc's finest moment. The final part, "The Buildings They are Sleeping Now," is a quiet whoosh of fragmentary strings and deep noise. The disc simply falls apart; the last moments are so inaudible that you're never sure when the music has actually stopped.

Murray Ostril introduces the second disc with his reminiscing on the heyday of Coney Island. The sentiment is so politically and religiously neutral that it stands apart from other Godspeed field recordings: nostalgia for the good old days. Nothing more. The second part of "Sleep," "Monhein," is dominated by Efrim Menuck's wailing screwdriver-on-frets effect. From this plodding dirge comes an incredible air raid siren of sound, flagging and rising over the military percussion. But instead of the familiar tension and release, Godspeed opts for maddening sustain. When the drums die out, all that remains is the tremulous scream.

After a Labradford-like introduction of repetitive guitar and subtle chimes, "Broken Windows, Locks of Love Part III" erupts into sheets of noise somewhere between Loveless and Pangea. The advent of nimble, almost hip-hop drumming, is a shock, and a loose, raucous jam coalesces, recalling Cul de Sac's country-surf-kraut concoctions. Part of you will say: why can't it all be like this?

The final track, "Antennas to Heaven," begins with an old mountain folk tune, which is inevitably consumed in processed machine noise. Echoey chimes and looped glockenspiel reverberate through "Edgy Swingset Acid" while Francophone children dreamily play and sing. The playground, however, is weirdly menaced by liturgical organs that soon give way to a momentary burst of dense, jangly rock. On "She Dreamt She Was a Bulldozer She Dreamt She Was Alone in an Empty Field," guitars and bells tick-tock over delicate dark ambient, counting the moments as the instruments flare up on fire and descend like a sunset. Godspeed You Black Emperor! have apparently expanded their emotional repertoire of indignation and grief to include joy. But the appropriately titled "Deathkamp Drone" is ghostly electronic gloom. The track's final moments are a wash of humming synths, echoing guitars, and pins-and-needles noise that comes just a little too close to human screaming. By the time the piece ends, the tide is way out.

Real innovation in a leaderless nontet must be geologically slow. Lift Your Skinny Fists succeeds precisely because it utilizes Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s numbers in a way that previous works did not. Lift opens up its sound to various voices and influences within the collective, letting moments of pop/rock, ambient and even hip-hop blossom where once there was only gravelly symphonics and aural landscape. Those moments were, for me, nothing short of thrilling. This is why Lift shouldn't be accused of merely preaching to the converted fan who has long since accepted the grandiosity of their sound and the vague rhetoric of their dissent. They show signs of doing what they condemn the world for not doing: changing, evolving, experimenting with new approaches, growing. And that's why Godspeed You Black Emperor!-- along with Jeremiah, Blaise Finnegan and every other prophet of doom-- might all turn out to be wrong. Perhaps it does get better before it gets worse.