"The car's on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn
We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death"
It is with these words that we begin one of the most emblematic albums of the late 90s and certainly, one of the main post-rock albums ever composed. Despite the age of these songs, especially Dead Flag Blues, which starts the album in this melancholy speech about an allegedly very real dystopia of the future of our planet, F # A # Infinity songs are more current than ever.
In times of pandemic, political disagreements, pieces of rockets falling from the sky, economic crisis in eternal rise, the march in a progressive loop of the very long and deeply melancholic songs with a tone of fatalistic existentialism is like an inevitable soundtrack. And not by chance, this is the fuel that generated so many of the group's most powerful tracks. And speaking of a group, it would be good to give an idea of how this unconventional group works. Starting with the fact that they are actually a collective. Godspeed You! Black Emperor started in 1994 in Quebec. The main heads behind the project are Efrim Menuck and Mike Moya who even chose the project's very curious name because of a 1976 documentary of the same name. The band quickly grew because both members wanted to make the sound more full-bodied and complex, with textures and layers, and as they said it wasn't necessary to get into the project, just to know how to play an instrument and be a good person.
This collective's first album was recorded with 10 members. The album contains only three songs, but two of them with almost 20 minutes and one with almost 30 minutes. The name of the album literally comes from the chords chosen by the band and also in reference to the "endless loop" present at the end of the vinyl record, which makes it repeat itself forever if it is not turned off. The design of the first presses was literally done by hand by the band members and even contains variations of the cover, with different photos. The internal insert had various handmade materials and even an American penny crumpled by a train (which passed behind the studio).
For me, Godspeed You! Black Emperor has become Post Rock's most powerful and profound project although the genre varies a lot according to the influences and paths they follow, and GY!BE has an almost always more "violent" footprint, a kind of melancholy and hopeless militancy. After that first job, they released several other great albums and each one is worth listening to. Finally, I leave here a visual composition that I found on youtube for the song Dead Flag Blues, but beware, the video is somewhat graphic, nothing gore, however, violent at certain times.
I hope you enjoyed reading and that if you didn't know the album, now you have a new musical horizon. Thank you for your vote!