AKHIL SOOD

The instrumental post-apocalyptic postmodern audio experiment with the most pretentious name ever, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, are back. All’s good with the world again, even with the impending sense of austere desolation that GY!BE brings to the table as ever. Their newest record, Allelujah! Don’t’ Bend! Ascend!, is yet another excursion toward the boundless sonic depths; defying the borders of auditory wavelengths within the context of music, as opposed to simply being a dreamy collection of ‘songs’, a term best used only nominally when it comes to these guys. Sounds, surreal by their very nature, defy conventional ideas of interval and intonation, with violins, blaring horns, vast swathes of washed-ashore passages, bells, sheltered rhythmic interspersions, and guitars howling with fierce feedback preceding fragile hypnagogic melodic departures converging to points and counterpoints of perfect concord.

‘Mladic’, the opener, with its 20-minute length, pushes the limits of the average listener (like pretty much anything they’ve ever written); she can only go so far – inadequate attention spans and all that – but GY!BE implores her to submerge herself in that intense wave they inevitably invoke. There’s the soaring peaks strewn across here too – ‘We Drift Like Worried Fire’ (again like 20 minutes long) springing to mind instantly – with the steady dynamic of poignant crescendos pretty much ever present. It’s really some kind of an emotionally sapping exchange of energy and communication that the process of listening to any album by GY!BE entails – one of complete vulnerability and trust in that very precious moment. Then again, it’s a moment that stretches on and on. It’s draining, but just as rewarding, that moment. The album’s dynamic and creepy, and hollow in that very enchanting and shadowy manner, but ultimately uplifting – it’s essentially just a moving experience, but also one that remains distant, enigmatic, and quite incomprehensible for like forever. Until it doesn’t anymore.