AR: f#a#∞

Godspeed You Black Emperor - f#a#∞ (1996)

A low-register, mechanical hum swells and rolls across post-nuclear plains for a full 38 seconds before the narrator matter-of-factly comes in: "The car's on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel ... and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides." Thus begins the dark but oft-thrilling ride that is Godspeed You Black Emperor's first LP, f#a#∞ (pronounced "eff-sharp-ay-sharp-infinity").

The stark black and white photo that adorns the album's cover could not hope to evoke the bleakness of these opening spoken word moments of "The Dead Flag Blues." The narrator goes on to describe a devastated landscape. The sweet, sad strings that finally kick in a minute into his speech (backing the lines "It went like this: the buildings toppled in on themselves ... mothers clutching babies ... pick through the rubble and pull out their hair") barely pierce the mood that he has foisted. His speech hits a resigned, "Kiss me, you're beautiful* ... These are truly the last days" before yielding to a moody, windblown guitar plus strings instrumental. Here the tune takes its time, lumbering in a slow, echoing, hypnotic drone that weaves cellos and whining, scratching violins against guitars and bells. The narrator eventually comes back to deliver the unsubtle recap, "I open up my wallet / And it's full of blood." GYBE apparently have some rather negative feelings about the state of things, and they waste no time in sharing that fact or, by sheer musical will, drenching the listener in their mindset.

* - This HAS - given apocalyptic content, etc. - to be a David Bowie's "Five Years" reference.

f#a#∞ often gets pegged as an apocalyptic album, and with an opening six minutes and a message like that, one can hardly fault that pegging. But to leave it at that in your internal categorization scheme, to let that striking initial six *entirely* define the album, is to miss out and badly. True enough, it's largely bleak, dark and eerie - the puppies and unicorns got swallowed up in whatever atomic dust-storm rolled through town - but in addition to the wasteland howl, there is a wealth of artful rock music, incredible highs and lows, within this fantastic debut.

GYBE is an experimental art band with all kinds of avant garde and neo-classical / modernist leanings, but they manage to remain a (post) rock band. They are notorious for utilizing spoken word, found sound, noise collages and multi-layered composition. Underneath this far-reaching, ambitious approach is a passion that occasionally releases itself via the everyday power chord. f#a#∞ fully displays GYBE's famed wide dynamics - volume, instrumentation, style, medium, emotion (!), etc. - and this LP represents a definitive moment in '90s post-rock. If you have any inclination to the full bore music-as-cinema experience, you will love this album. (You will, though, need headphones, darkness, and a fair chunk of time for even a single song - the three tracks of f#a#∞ cover an hour and three minutes).

Getting back to the post-apocalyptic sonic trip in progress, GYBE's found sound proclivity is the next thing that pops up on "The Dead Flag Blues." The über-familiar sounds of a locomotive whistle and engine (the aptly named movement, "Slow Moving Trains") break the silence that follows the opening spoken word piece. The train, too, fades into silence before an other-wordly melange of hollow metallic sounds slowly crescendoes to a pulsing peak. A lonesome and familiar, multi-layered, super-reverbing guitar kicks in for the gorgeous, more conventional rock movement entitled "The Cowboy...". This highlight movement cannot help but draw Morricone comparisons from reviewers' pens; the success of its tone hints that GYBE was born to craft 21st century neo-oater soundtracks for Cormac McCarthy adaptations. The Spaghetti-Western rock, surprisingly, rides off into the sunset, ending the 16 1/2 minute track with a verily upbeat, happy jaunt, complete with fiddle. One wonders what became of the hair-pulling mothers that began this piece, but there it is - a smoothly blending, dynamic trip of a huge opening track.

"East Hastings," the album's second full, eighteen minute track, begins with the found sounds of traffic and a heavily accented street preacher's rambling ("...Nothing's Alrite in Our Life..."). . Bagpipes reprise themes from the first track ("The Dead Flag Blues (Reprise))" as the din grows progressively louder, eventually fading to sound effects and lone notes from a guitar. The next ten minutes ("The Sad Mafioso...") are a striking, intricate pattern of tension and momentum. The song shifts back and forth from introspective meditation to an outright march, seemingly adding an army of instruments as it rolls forward. These are perhaps the most dramatic moments on the disc, and the ones where the label "rock band" springs back to mind. That charge collides with a wall and drops off the edge, leaving another mysterious radio message / noise collage in its stead ("Drugs in Tokyo"). It's haunting, disturbing, yet somehow relaxing ... at least until about 1:30 left in the track, when strings and sound effects are used to simulate an air-raid by the world's largest mosquitoes ("Black Helicopter"). This is really the only point on the album where the noise art borders on annoying art, and it slightly mars an otherwise superb pair of tracks.

The final track, "Providence," is a thirty minute composition that revisits many of the ideas from the first two tracks, tweaking each slightly and using the extended platform for cathartic spazz-outs. It begins with a street interview about the end of the world. Apocalyptic? Well, the interviewee denies it ... he's backed by another noise collage ("Divorce & Fever...") which segues to another pulsing tension-and-release momentum piece, this one highly percussive, that uses all the band's instrumentation ("Dead Metheny..."). Another Morricone riffer follows, this one ("Kicking Horse on Brokenhill") more about melodrama and conflict than before. The violin interlocks with the tremolo guitar brilliantly, both surging toward bell-rung triumph, one of the moments that will make you question the "f#a#∞ is just bleak" thesis. A droning, fuzzy noise piece serves as the close ("String Loop Manufactured During Downpour..."), and after a few minutes the album drops into the lowest of its dynamics yet: three and a half minutes of silence. At 25 minutes into this final track, a coda of sound creeps back in ("J.L.H. Outro") and steadily heads upward, ending the album on a rock out exclamation point that explodes to reveal nothing but that same album-opening mechanical hum in its place.

Despite the initial shock of apocalyptica that f#a#∞ delivers, the album as a whole gives a much more dynamic range of musical experiences, some of which touch on optimism and faith in loner cowboy heroism in the face of holocaust. It's probably obvious that I admire this album quite a bit - true enough that the third track doesn't match up to the power of the first two, but that's a small complaint for a wall-to-wall intriguing album. Post-rock can often feel somewhat clinical / antiseptic, even alien in its frank experimentation, but in f#a#∞, GYBE has pulled off the big trick - being deliciously weird, mysterious, and cynically cool while delivering music that practically pleads for the pains and highs of human feeling. It's amazing that a largely vocal-less rock album can pull this off, but it has - there's soulful power in this badlands murk. This is admittedly art music, an acquired taste and one that requires concentration - i.e. you should think of this more as something you would go to a museum to listen to than something you can leave playing while doing house-cleaning or driving your car. That said, it is an extremely rich experience, an accomplished archetype of the genre, and a work that I thoroughly enjoy.

Status: Recommended
Nyet's Fave: "The Dead Flag Blues"