Review Summary: Do you miss the old sound?
Much is said about pre-hiatus GY!BE and post-hiatus GY!BE. To the nostalgists, there hasn’t been a True record since 2012, or maybe it was 2002; maybe there hasn’t been one since the millennium. Remember Coney Island? They just haven’t had it since f#a#. Flags dead at the tops of their poles. Crescendos so played out that dead silence feels more impactful. Remember when Godspeed was good?
But therein lies the issue with every single discussion of Godspeed since the return; a trap even now I find myself falling into: we are obsessed with nostalgia. Those samples on Lift yr Skinny Fist were so good! Indie Sleaze is back! Turn on Netflix and watch another show about the 80s. Every day on the bus another contest for the widest 70s style pant leg ever stitched. I should post a review on that site I last used when I was a child! This same exact pathological obsession with the past infects those records as much as it does every one of us; stale dreams of some future buried back in time when everything made sense and felt safe. They used to sleep on the beach. Remember?
You are an adult now. At least mid-20s, and that’s if your mother got you started early; piping in East Hastings while you were still nestled in the womb. Either that or you’re a very precocious teenager. Do you find yourself yearning for a past you never existed in? Are you the world’s first gifted kid to realize your generation simply isn’t as well-behaved as the last? Say what you want about him but Obama at least had class. Say what you want about Bush but he was no Donald Trump. When all is said and done, isn’t the current war kind of worse than that old one? Are these slightly uncomfortable thoughts?
“No Title as of 13 Feb 2024 28,340 Dead” is uncomfortable because it is not an album about the past, but a present that GY!BE has been tiredly pointing towards since they traveled out of our nostalgia-addled memory back into the real world. It is uncomfortably titled; a mere snapshot of the estimated number of people murdered in Gaza; a number that has likely ballooned to five times that in some estimates—a number that will continue to grow with every passing day. “No Title as of 13 Feb 2024 28,340 Dead” is uncomfortable because it is a confrontation with now. Now they don’t sleep on the beach; they are drowning in desperation; swimming for aid packages dropped carelessly in the ocean—kept awake by the ceaseless pounding of the, as of 4 June 2024, 70,000 tons of bombs dropped on Gaza. 70,000. There’s another snapshot of a sliver of a future sum.
We all dream of the past, but nothing is alive in the past. Outside, the people alive now, the people with futures, hopes and dreams; the people that make beautiful noise and smile—the children that play innocently in fields and rubble; they are dying right now. Gaza is dying right now. And what will you be? Another pale spectator taking photographs, later to point at and remember with a sorry sense of nostalgia how sad this was when it all happened and the entire world sat still, arms crossed and eyes covered. It will be easier to engage with as a memory or a summary on wikipedia. By then the raw emotions are done away with and it can all be suitably archived in the endless library of tragedies, to be coldly evaluated, ranked, and rated on the great scale of human suffering.
But is “No Title as of 13 Feb 2024 28,340 Dead” good noise? Well it doesn’t sound like Lift yr Skinny Fists. It soars, it beats, it crashes softly to the floor and explodes into serene disquiet. It is an embodiment of the present. Perhaps it is a disservice to do away with my objectivity as a proper Critic Of The Arts and respond with pure, undiluted emotion, but is that not the purpose of great art? I don’t know if I can tell you that the guitar made the correct sound and that the song had the proper structure, because it was furthest from my mind as I experienced. This urge to catalog, rate, and sort art on the proper scale of Goodness comes from the same place as nostalgia; an anesthetized method of interaction because we have deemed ‘feeling’ an inadequate measure of evaluation. Only when we are fully removed from passion and these spur-of-the-moment emotions can we look back and notice “what matters”, as if the thousand things we heard and felt and thought were meaningful at the time are immediately worthless.
We take for granted that there will be this future when we can reflect and develop the proper take; something that can correctly tread the line between our taste and the aesthetic of Having Taste; ignoring the reality that in a years time this could all be pounded rubble and dust. The half-life for depleted uranium is 4.5 billion years; I think the one for a proper opinion on the new post-rock record is somewhere between that and a few days. But how this ranks in the great GY!BE tier list iceberg in 10 years doesn’t matter; it was exactly what I needed to hear right now.
If this record embodies the present it embodies action, and as long as there is action there is still hope left in the world. One day there is hope that these cruel numbers will permanently freeze like printed copy on an album cover, but even on that day, you must keep your eyes unclouded by those dead dreams of yesteryear, you must continue to bear witness to the world around you, listen to living, breathing people around you, and act.
