Godspeed You! Black Emperor return to London with what is, for them, a hit album. Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress reached number 37 in the UK top 40, perhaps sent there by not just the devoted but initiates attracted by Godspeed’s status as the outliers of post-rock. The full album is played tonight as the second half of their set, all fiddle-led desolation and ragged glory.
The four-song suite, which the band were playing live well before they got around to recording it, was originally dubbed Behemoth by fans. And a behemoth it is: ponderous and oceanic, locking into repetitive grooves then punching its way out, it has the precision of a classical piece and the force of heavy metal. It makes demands on the audience; there’s no disappearing to the bar allowed – though some do, probably for a respite. But everyone else stays fixed to the spot, heads nodding.
A bluntly politicised band – they accepted Canada’s 2013 Polaris music prize on the condition that the cheque be donated to the Quebec prison system – their bleak worldview plays out tonight via an industrial clank and hum that conjures up closed factories and decaying brownfield sites. But it’s not all gloom round Godspeed’s way: for the first 20 minutes, the word “hope” flickers on a screen.
To get this party started, the eight members drift into view at their leisure, and chime in one by one, until all are locked into Hope Drone. The only stage lighting is provided by black-and-white projections; guitarist/leader Efrim Menuck and violinist/mainstay Sophie Trudeau are just about identifiable. Mladic references its subject, the Bosnian Serb general, with queasy Balkan inflections and projections of what look like typewritten prison files.
If ever there was music that could be the soundtrack to an imaginary movie, it’s this, the sheer scale of it attesting to Godspeed’s audacity.
