LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR really went for it on their 2nd full album LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN and made one of the most classic and eclectic post-rock albums ever. Although this double album embraces the post-apocalyptic soundscapes that the previous album and EP so successfully achieved, this album covers a much broader musical spectrum. As usual the band starts out with violins and soft repetitive musical patterns that slowly ratchet their way up the intensity scale. The album is broken up into four long sprawling tracks which are further subdivided into smaller parts but I rarely care about the minutia of song titles when I listen to such strange music like this as I usually think of something different than what was intended anyways. In fact the first track "Storm" doesn't necessarily conjure up meteorological connotations at all but makes me think of a colony of ants marching into a spiraled funnel. The rhythm is so steady and the variations occur at the speed of molasses flowing down a cone. The music starts out in a 3/3 waltz timing and somewhere along the intensity divide changes course into a 4/4 time signature as the tempo slowly gets faster and faster.

This album is amazing in how it combines elements of post-rock with ambient passages, classical chamber rock and plunderphonic sound samplings. Not unlike their other albums, it simply takes all those elements and adds on more. The soft parts are even more lush and ambient, the heavy parts are faster and louder and all seems to have the ability to take you on a limitless parade of sound that only ends arbitrarily for the sake of having to end the album. The melodic progressions are minimal while the subtle variations that ratchet the crescendos remind me more of the minimalist classical music of Terry Riley in how it's composed. The music of GODSPEED is very hard to write about since this is a kind of music that is highly subjective in how it affects the listener at any given moment. As many times as i've listened to this I am always amazed at how little is going on musically and yet how much is going on musically. It always leaves me a little perplexed as to why I like this yet I always end up realizing that I do. As with any successful type of avant-garde music it demands that the listener questions their very definition of what music is and with this release it pushes the boundaries even further. All I can say is that your fists don't have to be skinny to enjoy this one but even though it doesn't sound like anything you would hear in heaven it certainly gives a glimpse into another dimension where heaven might be a bit nearer.