The Albums of 2012 (#8): Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! (Constellation)

In an age where musicians can barely stub a toe without it hitting the blogosphere, the sucker punch release of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s first album in over a decade was testament to the elusiveness of the amorphous Canadian troupe. Yet what was abundantly clear was just how little had changed and how musically important they remained despite the yawning interval since 2002’s Yanqui U.X.O.

Back then, commentators were keen to point to Godspeed’s foreboding sense of fractious, post 9-11 paranoia, whereas on Allelujah!, visions of Arab uprising and financial collapse were the common citations. Certainly there is an Eastern slant on the note progressions of tumultuous twenty-minute opener Mladic but both this and the album’s other epic number, We Drift Like Worried Fire, have been performed live dating back as far as 2003.

What you get out of a Godspeed record then may ultimately depend on what you bring to it. However, despite the gloomy rhetoric and shrouded political sloganeering, the band seem increasingly unable to hide their lighter, more hopeful side. It was evident even on 2000’s breakthrough Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, hidden in plain sight on the euphoric horn crescendo of opener Storm as one example.

This time it’s in the album’s title, which shares a thematic similarity with Antennas, the liberal punctuation serving only to throw us off the scent. Then there’s the goofy album spine, credited to God’s Pee, which is about as juvenile as it gets. But mostly it’s the music, that wonderful, eerie, cacophonous music, with the aforementioned Worried Fire slowly unfurling into wave after wave of fluttering strings, ascending guitar lines and valedictory plateaus.

Godspeed may well be signifiers of dark and foreboding times, and perhaps their re-emergence is no coincidence with all that is going wrong in the world, but as the title suggests, nay commands, Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! is a work that inspires hope, both in a wider socio-political sense, but also in the power of fiercely-minded, non-conformist rock music.