/mu/sings — Chapter 1
LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN (2000); by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
As a way of easing myself into the unfamiliar music scene of 4chan’s /mu/ board, I thought I would start off with an album I already knew and appreciated. This will happen again but twice: halfway through our journey with REMAIN IN LIGHT, and at the very end with IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING. I have a history with this record, and have listened to it in many places — on an Airplane flight, while driving through a valley into oncoming rain, leaning against a radiator deep in the labyrinthine bowels of an office building… Yet the conditions I was under when I listened to it just now are probably optimal. 4 AM, in pitch blackness, a cold draft coming in through the window, and utterly and completely terrified.
LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN is the poster child for Post-Rock — a genre defined (and this is contentious, other definitions do exist) as using the elements of Rock to take the next step from Rock. When Canadian darlings Godspeed You! Black Emperor unleashed this project on the world in 2000, the genre was not yet fully legitimized, only having been coined some six years earlier in reference to the band Talk Talk (who feature on our list of albums to tackle a bit later). Now, however, it is an established musical tradition, and in many ways, …SKINNY FISTS… is to blame.
Before going forward with the review, I’d like to establish that, at the risk of sounding very pretentious, this is a ‘music listener’s album’. This isn’t to say that it is too sophisticated for the untrained ear (I’d like to aim for a higher level of commentary in this series xD), but you do get out what you put in. As I will describe at length, most of the fun of this album comes from deconstructing it and actively trying to listen for patterns hidden within. Unlike most music, it makes you work for the happy chemicals, and that’s not going to appeal to most people. That’s okay.
This won’t happen in every single review, but because this album consists of only four songs (2 vinyl discs x 2 sides each), we have the time and space for a song-by-song analysis. Without further ado, the album kicks off with:
Disc 1
1. Storm
While this album should really be listened to whole, in one sitting, to create its desired effect, the song that most often gets split from the others and put into playlists or talked about as a standalone is this introducing track that takes up the whole of Side A. And (while it’s not actually my personal favourite movement of this piece at the moment) it’s easy to see why.
Roughly around 3 minutes and 10 seconds into Storm, it radically changes from a tense orchestral prelude instrumentation to a sharper rock sound with the introduction of the drum set. At the same time, a motif is heard — a musical element that immediately catches the ear. It is then that you realize that you’ve actually been listening to this melody the whole time. The entirety of the introduction is this sequence of notes, but slowed down, reversed or flipped, muffled, spread over multiple instruments… The end result is that by the time the rock band plays it coherently for the first time, you’re not expecting it, but you’ve been primed for it. And that’s just the beginning.
This continues for the entirety of the piece. You will hear this snippet and a couple supporting melodies (but also repeated and reinforced ad infinitum) again and again, in soulful violin swells, in distorted metal-adjacent attacks, in near-silence where you don’t think you should be hearing any music at all. But you have to listen for it. It is a near 23 minute track, and sometimes it will be plain for you to hear and headbang to but often it will hide, concealed under what seems to be ambient, almost hollow stretches of composition. Until, of course, the last 5 minutes of the side-long epic. But I won’t spoil what happens then. I suggest putting on a pair of headphones and experiencing the whiplash firsthand.
It is after this song that I suggest asking yourself how you feel. I would not advise continuing if this experience leaves you tired, confused, or if you didn’t see the method to this madness at all. My advice, if Storm does not immediately click with you, forget about the rest of the album, and just keep revisiting this track until it… does. And that may never happen, and that’s totally fine. This… thing is not everyone’s cup of tea. Because the rest of it gets better, and to do that it has to get a lot worse >:)
2. Static
IT TAKES MOTIONS IT TAKES DEDICATION IT TAKES DEDICA-
The first four minutes of Static are a pain to sit through the first time around. The ‘exposition’ to Storm at least had the basic decency to be pleasant, if a bit vague. Here though, Godspeed You! Black Emperor pull no punches. Be prepared for a dark, brooding soundscape, with the EQ painstakingly configured to produce more jarring, high-pitched feedback than should even be possible. And once you get used to that, it devolves into the titular static — which sounds like a dead channel, if the noise of a dead channel was fine-tuned specifically to sound like alien parasites building a hive in your ear canal.
So where does it go from there? Where does LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN turn to after making sure a significant fraction of listeners have tuned out? It delivers a sermon, of course! The rest of Side B will be interwoven with a strange, Christian/Mandaeist-adjacent spiel about ‘the seed of God’ and unspoken words and ‘miry clay’, and ‘Urim and Thummim’ and such. Accompanied by… violin. The violin that during the first 20 minutes of the LP served as but one part of a larger, universe-sized whole will now take a leading role, and keep the focus on itself for much of Static. And it’s a beautifully written part, too — it is a soothing balm after what you’ve just been through. It sounds hopeful, bright, even. For all of three minutes.
The tune becomes quieter, the solo instrument more subtle, and a Cello comes into the mix, employing ominous pizzicato (plucking the strings with your fingers rather than a bow) to introduce a bassline. To explain why this bassline matters, I’m going to have to delve into some music theory. If this doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip the next paragraph.
Now, the most natural time signature in Western European music is 4/4, and could be theoretically used to transcribe what happens here. However, if it was up to me to score this, I would write it as being in 8/8 — a mathematically identical time signature that, nonetheless, conveys important information about how the notes should be accented. Instead of sounding out easy groups of two or four, the Cellist insists on a limping ‘DUN-dun-dun DUN-dun-dun-dun-dun’ rhythm — assembling the notes into a group of three and a group of five, making it sound much more like an odd time signature than 4/4.
The tension mounts until 9 minutes and 45 seconds into Static, until a distorted drum crash is heard and we get to my current favourite part of this entire project. The screechy feedback from the beginning of the movement gets into a duet with the violin, and the resulting effect is gorgeous. The call-and-response of the string melody that would be at home in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and the blare of the feedback is an electric mix of pain and pleasure that you need to go listen to right now to believe it. Outside of maybe the rare Stravinsky piece, it’s an experience I haven’t been able to find anywhere else in the world of music.
The rest of Side B continues in much the same fashion, with the palette of Storm coming back to play the same game as the violin, most of it following the strange 8/8 rhythm. Until, of course, it all comes to a grinding halt, and we go back to a coda consisting of the same industrial metallic sounds we started on. This is currently my favourite of the four tracks on this LP, and sets expectations very high for:
Disc 2
3. Sleep
The first 1.5 minutes of this piece are very, very different from the world of the first disc. Gone suddenly are the triumphant thunder and lightning of Storm and the machine cult of Static. Instead, we get “Coney Island! It was Coney Island. They called Coney Island, ‘the playground of the world.’ There was no place like it, in the whole world, like Coney Island when I was a youngster. No place in the world like it, and it was so fab-”
[TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES]
Suffice it to say that the peaceful atmosphere of the old man’s tale and the strumming guitar are serene compared to the rest of the record. Until the dissonance starts, that is..! Huh, this dissonance isn’t even that bad. Yeah, the violin comes in and the two don’t harmonize as easily as they might, and what seems to be a theremin joins the party and that sounds even sillier. In any other context, this would be a very dark instrumental, but when you’re still coming off the edge of the first two sides, you make peace with it.
Then the drums come in, and suddenly everything is terrifying again and you remember that we are all going to die. The percussion on LIFT… is really next-level this way — instead of just providing a rhythm, the way it fits into the harmonies serves to radically modify the mood of whatever melody they’re suddenly crashing over in a way I haven’t heard anywhere else.
However, the light at the end of this tunnel is close! Sleep soon shifts gears and the magic drum set I dedicated the last paragraph to start to do the exact opposite job — the tune changes to a shrill blare, but the percussive banging somehow makes it light, hopeful, and dynamic. Most of the rest of the song will continue the same way, until the end, where we get a beautiful woodwind section, and all is right with the world, and the heavens open up and you realize just how much of a masterpiece this album is.
4. Like Antennas To Heaven…
Fun fact! Trying to write a review of this final piece on the album delayed the article by about 3 weeks. I kept coming back, attempting to tackle it this way, that and the other. Finally, I’m admitting defeat. I still have no idea what this track is supposed to be. It’s got everything that sides A, B, and C have to offer, plus a very strange acoustic country interlude, plus French schoolchildren apparently chattering and singing about the Titanic movie???
Through repeat listening, analysis and contemplation, I think I’ve got the handle on the rest of this project. I’m confident that I’ve grasped at least some of the essence of Storm, Sleep, and Static alike. But Side D still baffles me — I don’t know what to focus on, have yet to deduce which bits are important and which are red herrings. Maybe none of it is important and everyone is laughing at me for trying to find patterns in nothingness. Maybe all of it is important and everyone is laughing at me for being such an uncultured, unsophisticated barbarian. I have no idea. And this is beautiful.
My abject stupefaction at this closing title track means that I have an excuse to revisit the album again. And if I still don’t get it, there will always be next time. There is more puzzle to solve, another threshold of focus and attention to the music that I’ve yet to cross, and the mere thought of this is exhilarating. Please, dear reader, go out and decipher this for yourself. There are few greater joys.
Conclusion
This is the album that opened my eyes to this scene. I already knew I’d be calling it one of the best projects of the new millenium, but frankly, I’m itching to call it one of the best in musical history.
If my ramblings sound like pedantic numerological delusion to you, then I have good news — a while ago, they would’ve sounded exactly the same to me. What separates my elation from delusion is that the patterns are real. If meticulously dragging your fingertips (ear-tips? Eardrums?) across the measures of post-rock and feeling their minute grooves and fissures sounds even slightly exciting to you, I urge you to LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN.
Here’s to hoping I find many more albums like this on my journey.
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