LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN

The past decade has been marked by an immense uprising of creativity, finally reviving the progressive spirit of the seventies, and, dare I say, improving on it. One of the new genres to have spawned during this movement is post-rock, which by this point needs no explaining, and neither does Godspeed You Black Emperor! One of the figureheads of the movement, Godspeed creates an atmospheric chamber-style sound that is minimalistic, yet fraught with melodies and experiments. There is a lot to take in, but it's never overbearing. You only have to inure yourself to some noise and their use of strange audio excerpts from things like an announcement at an AM-PM convenience store.

Not only the band's masterpiece, but post-rock's cornerstone as well, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven will floor you with one of the most memorable set of passages in music's history. The album is divided into four multi-movement suites, each marked with emotionally stirring melodies, beautiful lulls, and thunderous climxes. The power emitted by this record is seismic. I promise you that sitting through this will change your musical paradigm. If you thought that this wave of progressive music really had nothing to show beyond emulating past greats (though you would be wrong to think so in the first place), Godspeed will make you reconsider, even if you were the most stubborn past-dweller of them all.

This album is borne of the same writing style as the group's debut and the subsequent EP, but while the debut, despite it's qualities, was a bit drawn on and inconsistent, and the latter fixed those issues in a shorter output, this album manages to do it all extremely fluent for over 80-minutes. All of the postive aspects exhibited before has been synergized into this epic album. The soaring atmospheres will make you motionless, and the climaxes will leave you breathless. I won't go into further detail in analyzing this, because really you get out of it whatever you will, and there certainly is a lot to get out of it. Long made short, this album is not to be missed by anyone.