Don’t miss Godspeed You! Black Emperor when they make a stop at First Avenue on Friday, March 18th!
Godspeed You! Black Emperor returns with another soundtrack for our times. As the heretical anarcho-punk spirit of the title implies, Godspeed harnesses some particularly raw power, spittle, and grit across two riveting 20-minute side-length trajectories of noise-drenched widescreen post-rock: inexorable chug blossoms into blown-out twang, as some of the band’s most soaring, searing melodies ricochet and converge amidst violin and bassline counterpoint. Field recordings and roiling semi-improvised passages frame these fervent epics, and two shorter self-contained 6-minute pieces find the band at its most devastatingly beautiful, haunting, and elegiac. Poignant atmospherics, noise-drenched orchestration, drone, hypnotic swingtime crescendos, inexorably-layered towers of distorted clarion sound: G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END (2021) encapsulates every beloved facet of the band. Twenty-five years on, this new album is as vital, stirring, timely and implacable as any in Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s storied discography.
Opening the show will be Vaz. Scum-pop blasters Vaz are a consistently underrated Brooklyn treasure. Vocalist/guitarist Paul Erickson and spasmodic herky-jerk drummer Jeff Moordian have outlived all your favorite scenes – both emerged from the distressed clobber of AmRep stalwarts Hammerhead and released full-length records on practically every cool label in the ’00s (Gold Standard Labs, Load, Narnack). Their ill-tempered blast and squawk updates AmRep’s sinister sizzle for more extreme days, still teasing it with the boldest, brashest, shiniest hooks in the nu-pigfuck underground – think Queens Of The Stone Age getting a Pissed Jeans makeunder.
Tickets are still available HERE!
