Album Review : Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! | Jack Broughan

Deputy Entertainments Editor Jack Broughan reviews Canada’s finest, Goodspeed You! Black Emperor’s new albumGodspeed You! Black Emperor are one of those bands that I’m wary about reviewing. Like Bob Dylan, I always felt that GYBE fans would hunt me down and beat me to death with their discography printed on limited edition coloured vinyl. The reverence for GYBE is for an outsider like me something that can be understood pretty easily without any serious prior listening experience. On face value, the band are most certainly one of the corner stones of post-rock. A cornerstone not only because of the undoubted quality of their back catalogue but also because GYBE are one of those bands that lend themselves to a core obsessive following. Never quite transparent but often talked about the band’s public persona strikes more like that of IDM artists like Autechre and Aphex Twin. Open to exposure but often described as anarchists, partially due to the subtle digs towards major label involvement in the military industrial complex on the liner notes of Yanqui X.Y.O. Not to mention the band’s arrest in Oklahoma after a petrol station attendant misconstrued the band as potential terrorists.Regardless of the critical acclaim attached to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, I never quite went near the band, perhaps through sheer laziness or perhaps some underlying bias that convinced me post-rock music was the aural equivalent of running up a series of very steep hills. Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! most certainly shatters that notion. The record opens with “Mladic”, stirring with vague radio dispatches that sound like something from an emergency response unit and haunting violin melodies that sound like a character’s death scene in a war movie the track slowly unfurls into something much more. Moving from what sound like eastern stringed instruments (I’m not sure which) playing a quick paced driving rhythm building into staggered guitar melodies with gathered tension until exploding at around the ten minute mark into a rolling auditory assault. I’m sure many will have heard something similar in just about every post-rock album review, but the real beauty of GBYBE’s work is the sheer effortlessness the tracks seem to be executed with. Not once on “Maladic” does the dynamics seem forced or even signalled by any sort of obvious musical trigger. The transitions are so smooth; one could almost picture the band, psychically linked in some circle looking like pagans celebrating the winter equinox.

Moreover the record seems to be almost perfectly paced. With four tracks in total, the record has two seemingly ambient tracks: “Their Helicopters Sing” and “Strung Like lights at the Printemps Erable”. Usually the whole notion of an ambient track jammed into an album would make my eyes role, but in the context of Allelujah the tracks compliment the other two almost perfectly. Serving to diffuse the huge sound of the other two tracks, the ambient sections serve as a welcome respite, which is entirely in tune with the tone of the record. Moody, long and sounding like the perfect background music for astral projection “Their Helicopters Sing” begins with a slow droning violin passage which is built upon with more and more layers before dissolving into ghostly single note decay. “We drift Like Worried Fire” is the record’s second centrepiece track. Seguing from the aforementioned track with ghostly violins and soft droning bass unfurls into something a little more familiar. A slow walking paced arpeggio complimented by violin and progressively more aggressive drums and walls of guitar.

What’s perhaps the most striking aspect of the record is apart from its pacing and natural sound, I’m never once tempted to skip a track. Not a single second is wasted; the music moves so fluidly that on first listen the album finished seemingly in a matter of seconds. Every second of the record is put to good use and despite the grandeur of the tracks instrumental density none of it sounds like unnecessary filler or frills. Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! is most certainly a well-crafted and well thought out work. Completely removed from the well-trodden clichés of post-rock and enthralling from start to finish.