Back to the band
Hang on. Tear it down. Love." |
|
| Artist | GYBE |
| Title | "No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead". |
| Released | 28.08.2024 |
| Genre | Post Rock, Drone |
| Style | Chamber music |
| My rating | (9/10) |
|
Tracklist:
|
Credits:
|
Woah... Ok, so there's a lot of unpack here. This really is a BIG ONE.
Godspeed is a band that I met thanks to those rymcore/mucore "best albums" compilations. I didn't think much of them first. Well I liked LYSF and F#A# but I didn't come back to those albums and to band overall much often. Sometimes I listened to them as a background music, but I didn't really care at all. It all shifted over time, and they slowly but surely made their way to the top of my favourite music projects ever... The culmination of this was the live show that I attended on 14.04.2024 in Warsaw. I bought the tickets around november I think(?), and I anticipated this show with so much excitement, that I listened to almost exclusively GYBE throughout the rest of winter and spring! I listened to bootlegs, went down the GYBE lore rabbitholes etc. Fun times!
Around february 2024 the tour began and I've read on reddit that during the shows they are playing new stuff, that supposidely sounds like nothing else they ever did. I remember, I was out with friends and my gf when I opened reddit on my phone to check something and I saw a post about those new songs. I was intrigued about people's descriptions of them and the comparisons to Swans, Black Sabbath (Pale Spectator), Do Make Say Think, William Basinski (Babys in a Thundercloud) and Cliff / "happier Albanian" (Raindrops). The recordings of those songs were uploaded to yt and archive.org, but I really didn't want them to be spoiled for me! I wanted to experience them as intended - during the live show, with appropiate projections and with the grandiose vibe of a GYBE concert. And so I did, and I was not dissappointed at all...
The live show was literally the best moment of my life. I plan to write about it some day, so I'll just go on to write my thoughts about every track, as always. First, there's the intro track, that during the show was amalgamated into Hope Drone. Nobody could really tell for sure that this isn't an improvised, live-only intro track. But there it is, as an intro to this wonderful album. It's a nice addition. It's very cinematic and sets up the atmosphere very well. It blends neatly into the next song, which I have little words to describe... I literally cried when I heard "Babys" live that night. This song means very much to me, it feels very personal, intimate and vulnerable. Even though I'm aware about the political context of the album, this song alone feels very different to me. It has this very sentimental energy, almost like a love-letter or some kind of nostalgic anthem. I simply love it.
The next is Raindrops, which is very different in terms of vibe. It's weirdly happy. This is the happiest song about the horrific genocide that I know... It sounds almost triumphant, even within the chaos that the song drowns in during the ending crescendo. It also has this beautiful violin-heavy passage at the middle, which also features a vocal sample - a poem about the Palestinian genocide read by Efrim's partner. This is an incredibly serious and depressing moment and definitely a highlight on this record.
Lastly, we have the 20 minutes of vile madness of the Pale Spectator suite. This song is so evil sounding... Godspeed rarely ever gets so heavy and angry as here! And for a very good reason... Then it all ends with the bittersweet, hopeful and cinematic Grey Rubble. I don't have much to say here, it just speaks volumes by itself. This is one of these albums that are especially hard to describe without playing any music, so I recommed EVERYBODY to just listen!
But this is not the end, as the vinyl version of this album ends on a 13 minute ambient reprise of the Grey Rubble theme. This surely is among the most depressing music you'll ever hear. But I love it. It reminds me of tracks like "Rhubarb" and "Stone in Focus" by Aphex Twin, or of "Our Side Has to Win (for DH)" from GYBE's previous LP. I really enjoy "songs" that are just long chord sequences looped indefinitely. You can just drown in the warm ocean of noises and ambience. But this one hits different...
The elephant in the room is that this album is not an easy listen at all. It features a lot of drone, weird Efrim-core guitar (that is constantly echoing trebbly and drowning every other instrument in it's noise), and very hard to swallow poltical and moral message that throws a lot of people off. But the overall theme of this record and GYBE music overall, is that there really is hope. In grey rubble, there grow green shoots. <3
God I adore this record. It means a lot to me.
