Band:	Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Album:	G_d's Pee At State's End!
Style:	Post-rock
Release date:	April 02, 2021
A review by:	RaduP

01. A Military Alphabet (Five Eyes All Blind) (4521.0 kHz 6730.0 kHz 4109.09 kHz) / Job's Lament / First Of The Last Glaciers / Where We Break How We Shine (Rockets For Mary)
02. Fire At Static Valley
03. "Government Came" (9980.0 kHz 3617.1 khz 4521.0 kHz) / Cliffs Gaze / Cliffs' Gaze At Empty Waters' Rise / Ashes To Sea Or Nearer To Thee
04. Our Side Has To Win (For D.H.)

The first time I listened to this album, it was 6 in the morning, I had just arrived by train to a desolate pandemic stricken town. My workplace only opened at 7, so I walked, with this album blasting in my headphones, as the light was creeping in, and you could see a couple of cars and pedestrians filling the massive landscape. I arrived at work exactly as the album was ending, and the place was desolate too. I knew then and there, that this album wrote itself on me.

I guess I have to make some things clear about my tastes. Godspeed You! Black Emperor is that one band I wish to see live more than any, second to maybe Ulver or David Gilmour. I don't think I have a favorite album, but if I had to choose one it would be F♯ A♯ ∞ (the 1998 version that everybody knows). I don't mean favorite GY!BE album. I mean favorite album. Ever. The kind to rival The Mantle, Disintegration, Mezzanine, Deathconsciousness, Siamese Dream and Souvlaki. I guess that explains some of my ratings (back when I used to rate my reviews) and why I give so much praise music that other people would find boring. Or why I spend the first three paragraphs of my first 2021 review trying to explain the appeal of ambient music.

I have enjoyed every Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, but none of them connected to me the same way that F♯ A♯ ∞ did, not even Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. I kind of felt like each consecutive GY!BE album was a more distant version of its predecessor. Great, engaging, vital, but it couldn't bring up the same "once in a lifetime" feelings. To the point that, when I reviewed the predecessor, I felt like that was the most distant GY!BE record, and I had pretty low expectations for its follow-up. But even the worst GY!BE album is more than worthwhile. So this was the mindset that I went in. And probably if I had just listened to the album in a playlist with other albums released that day, while I was busy working or procrastinating, I wouldn't feel so attached to it. But it happened in just the right way. So now a stupidly titled album like this one, something that feels more like self-parody than anything else, is not only my favorite GY!BE record since their debut, but probably my favorite album in a long while.

First of all, there's a bit of a difference in the tracklisting of the Bandcamp and the Spotify (and other streaming services) versions of the album, in that the Bandcamp one takes the classic "4 tracks" approach, with the long ones being broken up into movements, while the streaming ones break up the movements into their own tracks. Just so you know. I didn't sense any difference to the actual music though. But compositionally, this album is two massive epics, each followed by a briefer interlude, and yet the flow makes it more favorable to the full listen anyway, so it's not as important how one breaks the tracks. This one is meant to be a full journey, best headset, shitty weather, loud, lose yourself. Immersion is the name of the game.

The one thing I didn't appreciate as much about Luciferian Towers is that it lacked those "field recordings / spoken samples" that made their early material so poignant, and it also tipped the "desolate / triumphant" scale of their sound too much towards the latter. So here the balance is restored in a surreal way, and even if the balance is still tipped in the same direction, this one actually manages to instill that hope. And if there is anything that their newer material had going for them is that the production gave the material a much more expansive feel, that doesn't necessarily improve upon the raw appeal of their originals, but gives it a new breath of life. And the new album does benefit from being expansive and feeling expansive in a way that none of their previous albums, except maybe 'Allelujah, felt like. There's more oomph in the crescendos, and more immersion in the drones. For a brief moment, when you can hear all the instruments, the storms are howling, everything is quiet, and you got over their stupid titles, you feel like this is the way that their music was always meant to be experienced.

My worst fear about this record and how I view it is that I only like it so much because it reminds me of something else, and that I am basically rewarding them for going back to their roots instead of exploring and expanding their sounds like they did on previous albums. Maybe I am starting to get old. But then, why does this feel so vital? There's something about this that feels so uniquely State's End-ish, in a way that builds upon their previous work, but matures it and perfects the craft. This is how to make build ups and releases that don't feel artificial or anticlimatic, or how to blend desolation and hope, or how to add so much detail to the instrumentation and the layering of samples without it ever feeling too crowded, or how to use drones to add feeling to a record instead of making it feel boring. This is more cohesive than they've been in forever.

Of course, this isn't a perfect album, and I'm trying not to let myself be carried away by the hype or the fanboy-ism. Even if it's quite telling if an album manages to get me this excited. But I can't deny that there are moments in the first and last track that do feel like they don't quite sustain or build the momentum properly. The opening samples might be a bit too off-putting for new listeners, and it isn't until the second movement that the instrumentation actually picks up. And as beautiful as "Our Side Has To Win" is, the climatic ending of "Ashes To Sea" felt like a more fitting end to the record. But for way that each of the instruments make their entrances in "Job's Lament" completely throttles the awe-inspiring factor that washes away any awkward moment of the opener, and even if some movement rearranging might've made the flow and the climax a bit better, "Ashes To Sea" just might be the best one since "Providence".

It's kind of fitting for the album to drop now. The previous one seemed fueled by politics more than anything else, and while this one also seems fueled by something fleeting, like a temporary pandemic, there's something that feels more universal about this album. I can imagine someone listening to this decades from now, with little knowledge of the COVID-19 pandemic, and still resonating with every feeling within the record. Like there's still some beauty in a dark desolate world.

God's pee is stored in the balls.