Godspeed You! Black Emperor
G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!
Constellation Records
LP – DL – CD
Out Now
Godspeed You! Black Emperor released their new album earlier this year, alongside a statement that I’ll post in full after the review.
‘we wrote it on the road mostly. when that was still a place.
and then recorded it in masks later, distanced at the beginning of the second wave.
it was autumn, and the falling sun was impossibly fat and orange.
we tried to summon a brighter reckoning there,
bent beneath varied states of discomfort, worry and wonderment.’
Fighting Boredom have been listening, read what we think below.
This is protest music. The statement given alongside the record makes that very clear. This is music to stand firm as a line of people move towards you carrying confederate flags and QAnon thoughts. This is music to play as you take a knee and hold a fist up high in front of paramilitary equipped police officers. This is music for shouting back, for decimating trolls, for holding rainbow flags in the tear gas and just for thinking and doing the right bloody thing. This is protest music. There’s no Fight The Power here, no Killing In The Name, no Fuck the Police. But it’s no less powerful or inflammatory for the lack of words.
It’s the feelings that it evokes that make it stand as strong and hard as anything you’ve heard before. Feelings of defiance, strength and hope. There’s beauty here alongside the power but above all there’s the feeling of protest, revolt and standing firm. The floods of adrenalin and the white cold fear of confrontation are all here.
But alongside all of that is the feeling of standing together, of being a part of something, of making change. It ends with the track Our Side Has To Win. Which rises like a new day. As I said, this is protest music. This is Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
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Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s website is www.brainwashed.com/godspeed
we fired up the shortwave radios again, for the first time in a long time.
and found that many things had changed.
the apocalypse pastors were still there, but yelling END TIMES NOW where they once yelled “end times soon”.
and the transmission-detritus of automated militaries takes up more bandwidth now,
so that a lot of frequencies are just pulses of rising white static,
digital codexes announcing the status of various watching and killing machines.
and the ham-radio dads talk to each other all night long.
about their dying wives and what they ate for lunch and what they’ll do with their guns when antifa comes.
this record is about all of us waiting for the end.
all current forms of governance are failed.
this record is about all of us waiting for the beginning,
and is informed by the following demands=
empty the prisons
take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise.
end the forever wars and all other forms of imperialism.
tax the rich until they’re impoverished.
much love to all the other lost and lovely ones,
these are death-times and our side has to win.
we’ll see you on the road once the numbers fall.
xoxoxox god’s pee
montreal, quebec, kanada
1 march, 2021
UK Tour Dates – January 2021
16/1/2022 – London, UK @ Electric Ballroom
17/1/2022 – London, UK @ Electric Ballroom
19/1/2022 – Bristol, UK @ SWX
20/1/2022 – Coventry, UK @ Empire
21/1/2022 – Glasgow, UK @ The Barrowland
22/1/2022 – Manchester, UK @ University Academy I
All words in the review by Adrian Bloxham
Words in the statement by Godspeed You! Black Emperor.