Review Summary: From start to finish.
It’s sometimes easy forget just how long music lasts. There is evidence to suggest that human beings have listened to music for as long as we have communicated with language. Of course, the vast majority of music has been forgotten; lost through either the evolution of civilisations, or simply the destruction or degradation of its written record. For us as musicians, I guess one of the things that matters to us is the hope that our art is remembered after we are gone.
I was five years old when Godspeed You! Black Emperor released
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. I had no idea who the Canadian post-rock collective were. I likely had no idea that Canada even existed. I was still in a period of utter excitement of the world, my thoughts flanked by uplifting trumpets and triumphant drums. That child-like whimsy led me to becoming interested in music, an art form I have only become more invested in in the twenty-four years since.
I was nineteen years old when I first discovered
Skinny Fists. I was afraid; an emetophobia-prompted breakdown at the end of my teens was clinging to me. I was suddenly and acutely aware of the inevitability of my own mortality. The words of preachers on the street, so often discounted as nonsense, began to have an effect on me. It was brief: any belief in the possibility of life after death dashed away and replaced by dissonance, fragmented staccato drums and the endless whirring of screwdriver-laden guitars. I fell into malaise. The days passed me by without a trace, the sounds of cymbals screeching via violin bows washed over me.
I was twenty-two years old when I first considered what things would be like for those I loved, were I not there. I was a shell of a person, my recovery from the few years prior merely a veil, waiting to be wrenched away from me. I was alone, left in a near-constant state of reminiscence, how things used to be better. How we would sleep on the beach. We didn’t sleep anymore on the beach. I felt time slipping away from me – twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five. The fear of a global pandemic was all I could think about. Again screaming guitars, again drums that wouldn’t cease, again dread that wouldn’t abate.
And then, quiet. A glimmer of normality, a sense of security, and, on the horizon, the sun beginning to rise. Time was still going quickly, I couldn’t stop that, but the sounds in my ears were no longer terrified, no longer in desperate denial of the inevitability of what was coming. No, this time they were hopeful: trumpets soaring, guitars in consonance, and a string line so beautiful that I was, and occasionally am still, moved to tears.
I don’t know how old I will be when I listen to
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven for the last time. My health has deteriorated in the last couple of years; I don’t know where that will lead me. What I do know, however, is that my last musical thoughts will be of this album. A last hurrah in my ears, an accelerando of drums and guitars and basses, before I begin drifting. Drifting to drones, at first unsettling, perhaps foreboding, but then to peace, to safety, and to acceptance.
This album is eighty-seven minutes of music, both a cautionary tale of the horrors of human existence as we know it, and a breathtaking journey through all that will come to us.
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven will last longer than I will, and it will be remembered by many others after I have gone. Such is the genius that Godspeed You! Black Emperor put to tape twenty-four years ago.
