LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN

GY!BE one of the greatest bands of all time, no doubt. While I believe that f#a# infinity is a better album, this one is truly the more influential. Delayed distortion, positive atmospheres, tremolo and delay, horn sections, this album started it all. Yeah, Mogwai, Tortoise, Talk Talk, and Slint are supposed to be the God fathers of the genre, but this single collection of songs are what define modern day post rock.

There really is little to say about the album. The first song starts extremely happy, with soft horns in the beginning, and ten minutes later you have a nine piece band giving all they got to create some of the most intense and beautiful music you have ever heard. All this just for the song to take one eighty degree turn to some of the most bleakest, depressing music created. The second is almost as bleak, but with a very hard hitting and emotional monologue at the beginning that really takes the spot light for the rest of the song. The, bleak, but at the same time very experimental, instead of focusing on climaxes through either really pessimistic, or optimistic sections, they add layer upon layer of fuzzy distorted guitar with delay of course, therefore adding more and more tension, creating a climax with almost no melody. The third not as depressing, but just as experimental, and arguably the best song of the four.

The only thing that really bothers me on this album is that it's very samesy, Efrim must have been really excited about delaying his distortion, cause that guitar tone is used throughout the album in almost every climax. Don't get me wrong, it's my favorite tone out there, but really this group defines versatility, they shouldn't need to use the same tone for every climax. One thing I really like about the album is the drumming! Post rockers aren't known for their drummers, but man this guy can run circles around some of the bigger guys out there. He's able to make a really complex beat, and speed it up, do really cool fills, and knows how to use his kit to really give that extra power to the height of all the songs.

Well, not a masterpiece for it's lack of variation, but definitely extremely close. Four stars.