I had always thought Simon Reynolds had coined the term “post-rock” in regards to Tortoise but a little digging shows that Bark Psychosis and specifically their Hex record was the point of origin. Initially meant to connote the use of non-rock instruments into rock music, it didn’t take too long for the movement to turn into a giant wave of crescendocore, with bands utilizing the typical guitar/bass/drums setup.
While Godspeed You! Black Emperor nestles cozily in the LOUD quiet LOUD end of the genre spectrum, they utilize violin and in their first phase, also cello, to create a varied tonal attack of stringed instruments, and really not much has changed since those days. The band had to unexpectedly cancel the tail end of their 2024 dates in support of their latest record, No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead and Boston closed out the rescheduled shows. (For those locals who missed these shows, they are playing Tree House Brewery in Deerfield as well as Portland Maine in the early Fall.)
Lots of bands have been pretty overt with their opinions of the Palestine/Israel quagmire but nary a word was said nor a flag was draped; the title of the new record speaks for itself. The live approach has been the same since first seeing them in 2012, mostly seated musicians hunched over their instruments with arrays of effects pedals covering much of the stage floor and looping, grainy film footage that ooze despair and bleakness displayed behind them.
But there’s an occasional ray of light poking through the dystopian haze, and ever since they came out of their self-imposed seven year exile in 2010 (another example of the sadly defunct UK promoter All Tomorrow’s Parties doing god’s work), they have opened every show with “Hope Drone,” a still yet-to-be officially released song.
I’m glad that the band credits the projectionists (this time, it was Karl Lemieux) and it’s a Herculean effort to man the four units and dozens of tape loops, not losing track of which is which, not damaging them in the darkness while feeding or removing, and then laying them over stands to keep them sorted and in good condition. While the band’s output has plenty of emotional heft, without the visuals it wouldn’t bring the same impact.
I wasn’t familiar enough with the new record to know if they played the entire thing or not (setlist.fm doesn’t include “BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL” but previous shows had bundled it in directly in with “PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS”) and aside from “Sleep”‘s excerpt of “Monheim” where violinist Sophie Trudeau’s quavering tone approximated a theremin, the only other older material played came with the last two, the sweeping and majestic “Bosses Hang” and “BBF3” where everyone’s favorite misanthrope Blaise Bailey Finnegan III starts his harangue against the state and gets increasingly agitated as the tempo and volume rise accordingly. Given today’s state of my country, the dialog of “Like I said, America’s a third world country as it is and… and we’re just basically in a hopeless situation as it stands” is eerily and depressingly prescient.
When you’ve got a very thematically strong headliner, it’s often best to have the opener provide a completely different sonic experience and Marisa Anderson did just that. Whereas Godspeed leader Efrim Menuck has seven comrades to keep him company under the cover of relative darkness, Anderson stood alone under the stage lights with just her Telecaster. On the surface, her playing appears to be simple blues-scale oriented but there’s much more going on than first meets the tympani (and hammer, anvil and stirrup). Midway through her set she referenced a Syrian violinist discovered when she got access to a record collection, and started adapting material from it.
A somber mood accompanied a song referencing bodies wrapped in white linen, twinned to Irish instructions for processing grief from the 1200s. A long ringing note recalled the peal of a bell, and she closed with a more traditional folk structure on “The King Of Hummingbirds.” I am not sure how many of the audience was familiar with her before tonight, but she definitely got a very warm welcome.
