When Angular Guitars Collide

By Bradford Frese | Wednesday, February 5, 2003

I've decided that there's a silver lining to the administration's recent budget cuts. Thanks to the budget crisis, last term saw the first display of widespread revolutionary zeal that I've witnessed since coming to Dartmouth. At the outset of the fall term, tensions mounted between students and administration. Student groups plastered the campus with flyers critical of the administration's budget plans; scathing op-eds appeared in the Daily Dartmouth. When the administration announced that the swimming and diving teams were to be eliminated, the dam burst. Outrage swept the campus and gave way to action.

Listening to any of the songs on Godspeed You Black Emperor's Yanqui UXO is, at least to a degree, like watching the events of last fall unfold in the space of twenty minutes. After the fashion of a vast number of folk and hardcore punk acts, Montreal-based Godspeed You Black Emperor perform compositions that seek to soundtrack an impending world revolution. Yet it must be acknowledged that GYBE learns little from these genres beyond a tired, prefab 'revolutionary aesthetic.' The band is like a WTO protester: all dreadlocks, arson, and Che Guevara T-shirts — but precious little substance.

Instead of providing a message, pieces jump back and forth between acoustic passages, post-rock, neo-classicial symphonies, and out-and-out sonic bombast. GYBE adds layers of instrumentation until the listener is swept up into a maelstrom of drums, guitar, bass, and violins.

The most frequent criticism leveled against GYBE is that the band refuses to deviate from the 'melody, crescendo, repeat' pattern. Indeed, GYBE's music is either spellbinding or mind-numbing, usually depending on the listener's tolerance for repetition. The problem for the band, however, is that everybody who found its previous releases tedious will hate this album still more, and there is no guarantee that those who didn't will enjoy Yanqui UXO.

The band has significantly altered its sound for this release: first, they've managed to integrate dissonant harmonies, off-key melodies, and driving rhythms into their usual modus operandi of wailing guitars and drones. Most noticeable is that the collective has given up on the rants, dialogues, and bits of found sound they used to place between movements and occasionally beneath the music. This makes the album more fluid than any of the band's previous efforts; one is no longer jolted by hisses of static, pieces of radio conversation, and nostalgic nursing-home residents.

GYBE feels they can make up for this by flaunting their politics in the packaging, which is undoubtedly the worst thing about this album. The front shows bombs dropping out of an airplane over a peaceful green field, while the back is a complicated diagram linking five major record labels to the military-industrial complex. Translation: Avril Lavigne's Sk8ter Boi is financing fighter jets to bomb Iraq. This would be hilarious if the band weren't downright serious, and it even comes off as hypocritical when a mail-order catalog for the band's record label, Constellation Records, falls out of the liner notes. On the slipcase that holds the CD, GYBE claims the album was mixed by 'God's pee' as well as by some engineer, and they tell listeners that 'though godspeed is guilty of profiting from hateful chain-store sales, we encourage you to avoid giving money to predatory retailers and superstores.'

Even the album's title is supposed to be revolutionary. According to the band's homepage at Constellation Records, 'UXO is unexploded ordinance is landmines is cluster bombs,' and 'Yanqui is post-colonial imperialism is international police state is multinational corporate oligarchy.' Absolutely no reason is offered as to why the 'yanquis' are a multinational corporate oligarchy, nor why the album has anything to do with cluster bombs, but GYBE seems to feel that their status as artists exempts them from forming valid arguments. Perhaps this is true within the confines of their all-black clad nontet, but to the rest of the world it's just a trite bit of anti-American rhetoric from some weepy Québécois.

The problem is not GYBE's politics — they would be tolerable if they didn't try to stretch the truth like taffy or admit their own hypocrisy within their revolutionary statements — but that the packaging is the only place they make any sort of statement, whether radical or ridiculous. The layers of paper around the CD reveal that GYBE is not merely pretentious, but also irrational; they want you to believe that the music on the CD is earth-shattering. And the music is far from earth-shattering. This album is the band's third release in four years, and while the music may be a step forward from 2000's almost universally acclaimed Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, it's a very small step. At the same time, too many other bands have managed to capture GYBE's apocalyptic aesthetic (sans the shrill, condescending attitude), and the band's brand of instrumental catharsis is becoming more and more commonplace in music scenes all over the United States and Europe.

The largest source of Yanqui UXO's problems is famed engineer Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies). Here, his lackluster production muddles instruments and dulls the band's sharp edges. In the louder moments, cymbal rolls become little more than hisses and the three guitars become indistinguishable from the violins. Perhaps it's the fact that I'm not listening to the album on vinyl (Albini has urged fans to scratch, burn, and eat egg sandwiches off of his CDs), or perhaps it's the inherent difficulty of keeping nine instruments clear and distinct, but the 'Albini method' probably deserves a good deal of the blame. It paints GYBE's typically massive sound into a corner, giving the album a muddy, washed-out feel.

Nevertheless, I must admit that, after listening to this album for two months, I've come to enjoy it. Some of this album's best moments come in the quiet spaces between crescendos: both the tortured dirge that appears seven and a half minutes into 'Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls' and '9-15-00 Part 2' are gorgeous soundscapes that suggest GYBE is not resting on its laurels. The former uses a brass melody on top of a processional drumbeat to create an air of impending catastrophe, while the latter uses the sum of GYBE's instrumentation to create somber tones that bring images of a desolate battlefield to mind.

At the same time, there is a great deal of joy to be found in the bombastic builds as well: the first seven and a half minutes of 'Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls' are a trip through the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic; reverbed guitar plinks propel the song through a cloud of dissonant tones until everything bursts in a blast of flanged guitars, strings, and rolling percussion. Likewise, 'Motherf---er=Redeemer' begins with sparse, plinking Orff instruments that give way to a driving three-on-the-floor beat.

I usually enjoy Godspeed You Black Emperor's music, and after listening to Yanqui UXO for two months, I think I enjoy that, too. At the same time, though, I had to work past the baffling packaging, the nonsensical phrases on the CD sleeve, and the murky production. It was only after I had sorted through the mess that I discovered there was good music in there. If one has the time to make the effort, one will find Yanqui UXO to be a crafted, detailed, and enjoyable musical experience. Casual listeners, however, need not apply.

When Angular Guitars Collide

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