Band:	Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Album:	Luciferian Towers
Style:	Post-rock
Release date:	September 22, 2017
A review by:	RaduP

01. Undoing A Luciferian Towers
02. Bosses Hang
03. Fam / Famine
04. Anthem For No State

This is the weirdest and most unexpected Godspeed You! Black Emperor album I've listened to, from the press release to how it baffled expectations. Let me explain.

The album's name is Luciferian Towers (and together with the cover art it should already evoke some industrial metropolis hell) and it is Godspeed You! Black Emperor's most political record. Hell, just take a look at the grand demands that came with the press release:

"+ an end to foreign invasions
+ an end to borders
+ the total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex
+ healthcare, housing, food and water acknowledged as an inalienable human right
+ the expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again"

With the current political climate it would be expected that they would get political and did in quite a strong manner. They've been telling us that the government is corrupt since 1997. I do not want to get too deep into the politics of this, but with all this far-left revolutionary background that they give this album, they afterwards release their most melodic and controlled and accessible record. It's baffling how uplifting it is, when everything up to it built different expectations, including the previous two releases, which had some of their heaviest moments. I guess we should at least be thankful we didn't get another Prophets Of Rage.

Now I do not want to downplay the album solely on how it defied my (and likely not just my) expectations or on how it reconfigures their sound, ye olde "they're not the same". I appreciate changes in sound, whether radical or subtle, yet I cannot simply comment on innovation without looking at craft, so let's look at both.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor have always been the soundtrack to chaos, to the dystopian and the fallen, though never without any ray of hope, yet here it seems like that ray of hope is a lot brighter than it used to be. Completely devoid of their trademark field recordings, it feels like Luciferian Towers is placing a lot more emphasis on one side of the balance they used to have in their sound - call it the life-affirming rather than the destructive.

Those changes in sound affect the feel of the album quite a bit, in the sense that even at its most climatic, in the peak of the apogee, there is a sense of yearning. Nothing in these album reaches the cathartic feel of past crescendos, no matter how well built some of them are. They put way too much weight on the life-affirming and tipped the scale. Perhaps they realised that they ran out of steam and wanted to channel all the energy left in a new direction.

And yet, underneath all these feeling of the uncanny, there still lies an entrancing charm to it. The grandeur is downsized, but it still finds its place. You could even do with no dialogue; the drones and the build-ups are there and they can feel amazing (especially "Anthem For No State"). This would be an amazing post-rock album, had it not been placed on the shoulders of giants. So every once in a while, you briefly exit trance, you feel like it could've been better, and then you fall a little further down.