“NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” is Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s eighth full-length and their first new released music since 2021, when they released G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! and it once again shows why not many other bands can claim to be as coherent as this collective from Montreal! So good to have them back and point to the problems of our modern world!

Whenever GY!BE release a new record, it’s like an earthquake and the whole (Post-Rock) world stands still. Even though they remain a band without sung vocals (albeit with a few vocal samples or spoken word passages), they have a lot to tell, musically and also philosophically. It often starts with their titles, which are more often than not complex combination of ideas and symbols – and the new record can thus also be read in three different ways: 1. “NO TITLE AS OF FEBRUARY 13” - 2. “NO TITLE (because) OF FEBRUARY 13” - 3. “NO TITLE (because) OF FEBRUARY 13 (there are) 28,340 DEAD” and with each new level, the title gets darker and darker. And before anybody asks – the number 28,340 is not a fictitious one, but the number of fatalities within Palestine on February 13, 2024, after roughly 120 days of war between Israel and the Palestinians. This information provides the last necessary bit of information to understand this record much more. Now read the tracklist again:
“SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS”, “BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD”, “RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD”, “BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL”, “PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS”, “GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOTS”.

Six tracks and you got it all in there, the dying children, the bombs fallen from the skies, the foreign journalist taking photos of the atrocities, the dust settling after the explosions, the debris lying around everywhere – and you got something else that GY!BE are known for, their anti-capitalist demeanor. That they criticize the western, capitalist world here should not come as a surprise given the fact that so many companies and people profit from this war. (heck even one of the alternative candidates for the US presidency was connected to these capitalist lines!) Hence it should be clear that Godspeed You! Black Emperor would not hold back with their views on this topic as they have never shied back from it. Please do not get me wrong – I believe that there are victims and criminals on both sides of the conflict in the Middle East, BUT that should not say that these war crimes should be ignored, should be justified by saying “But the Palestinians started it…” (the “it” in this sentence already indicates that not enough people know about the starting point of this downward spiral, where the United Kingdom and France are also to blame, but that is a completely different story. This war has got to stop and both sides should be stopped – the Palestinian extremists and the hardliner-nationalists within the Israeli government.

Musically this record is also a matter of the heart, and here the dichotomy of the GY!BE approach comes into play: Some of these songs are relatively bright, given the matter at hand. The opener is a wonderful combination of seemingly Japanese tunings and some light drones, one can find some perfect experiments when it comes to pace – for example the brilliantly balanced and counterbalanced ”RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD” which in its fastest passages would fit like a glove on a Sonic Youth record and whose pace sometimes has a tiny bit of Hendrix’ ”Star-Spangled Banner” performance at Woodstock, without the shrill feedback attacks. Something that should not be neglected is the way these eight musicians are now in full concordance with each other, and we can take Sophie Trudeau as a wonderful example here: Her violin passages sometimes underline the guitar parts providing a fuller soundscape, in other moments they over-exaggerate them a bit giving a piece of madness and menace of this war, and at times she is the lone melodic voice, for example in the melancholic and yet accusational ”BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL”.

Listening to this record will provide you with some fantastic musical moments, when the collective is in full bloom, when the instruments overlap and (unwillingly) seem to aim at playfully outperforming the others – tracks and passages simply creating a smile on the faces of the audience. Thinking about this record and its subject matter will make you cry out in pain, in something Germans call “Weltschmerz”, when the atrocities that mankind does to itself, to our fellow creatures and our mother Earth are simply too much to bear, when we simply cry to the stupidities called “capitalism”, “nationalism” or “tactical strikes”. Euphemisms being used to disguise our greed, our thoughtlessness and our way to self-extinction. Before this review will end with ”THE PLAIN TRUTH==”, the sole promo text released by Godspeed You! Black Emperor for this release, I want to say one thing: “NO TITLE AS OF NOVEMBER 01 43,000 DEAD, 101,000 INJURED, 1,900,000 DISPLACED”.

THE PLAIN TRUTH==
we drifted through it, arguing.
every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.
we sat down together and wrote it in one room,
and then sat down in a different room, recording.
NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?
and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.
the sun setting above beds of ash
while we sat together, arguing.
the old world order barely pretended to care.
this new century will be crueler still.
war is coming.
don’t give up.
pick a side.
hang on.
love.
GY!BE