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The timing of the release of Godspeeed You! Black Emperor’s eighth studio album, arriving on the same weekend as the first anniversary of the shocking Hamas-led surprise attacks upon Israel during which 1,139 people were killed, and 251 hostages taken, is no coincidence.
The title of the Montreal post-rock collective’s follow-up to 2021’s G_d’s Pee at State’s End! is an explicit, time-stamped reference to the death toll resulting from Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza: today, according to the latest Gaza health ministry estimates, the body count stands at 41,802 Palestinians, with a further 96,844 injured, and thousands more unaccounted for, presumed buried under the rubble of bombed homes, schools, hospitals and offices. The group’s decision to preface that brutal February 13 statistic with the words ‘No Title‘ is, perhaps, linked to a shared recognition that making art in a time of unimaginable horror may be accompanied by feelings of guilt, impotence and frustration, an awareness that layering guitars and tweaking snare drum levels in a recording studio as bodies burn elsewhere could seem utterly inconsequential, pointless or downright disrespectful. But really, what thought, emotion or creative expression of any kind is appropriate or proportionate while observing the world’s most powerful western nations not merely tolerating a genocidal onslaught dedicated to wiping the entire population of Gaza from the face of the earth, but actively supporting, indeed profiting from it?
The only words heard across the album’s 54 minutes and 11 seconds are a haunting meditation in Spanish spoken by Michele Fiedler Fuentes in the mid-section of the album’s stunning centre-piece, the epic, orchestral 13-minutes-plus Raindrops Cast in Lead, the closing lines of which translate as: “The women who died young, furious, or old, and never saw the sunrise / Innocents and children and the tiny bodies that laughed, and will sleep forever / And never saw the beauty of the sunrise”. But the track which follows, Broken Spires at Dead Kapital, the most stripped-back and succinct piece on the record, is perhaps its emotional peak, slowly-bowed, mournful electric bass and violin lines evoking the deathly, eerie quiet of a desolate, devastated wasteland, the thudding, reverberating funereal drum beats introduced in the closing 30 seconds reminiscent of a death march.
Anyone familiar with Godspeeed You! Black Emperor’s history will know that the Montreal group never spoon-feed their listeners, or offer interpretations of their art. But a key line in the brief, poetic statement which accompanied the news of this album’s release read, “Every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom”. Its closing tracks, Pale Spectator Takes Photographs and Grey Rubble – Green Shoots, are clearly intended to offer hope in these darkest of hours for the Palestinian people. The slogan “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds” has been adopted by civil rights activists and resistance movements worldwide across the past century, and …Green Shoots is the album’s most defiant and uplifting piece, evoking promises of a new dawn after the terrors of night.
With a few honourable exceptions (Kneecap, Lankum, Dua Lipa, Massive Attack among them) the music world has been shamefully quiet on the subject of Gaza, so many artists who claim to be politically and socially conscious inexplicably losing their voices when confronted with one of the most horrific conflicts of modern times. No Title As of 13 February 2024, 28,340 Dead may be an instrumental record, but it stands as the most powerful artistic statement yet on a tragedy history will not forget.
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