live @ 930 Club 12.4.2000
Montreal band Godspeed You Black Emperor! played a well received show in the Washington area last September and drew and that performance certainly helped them draw a nearly full-house of reverently hushed spectators to the 930 Club Monday night. The nine-piece instrumental ensemble---three electric guitars, two electric basses, violin, cello and two drummers---lived up to their reputation as musicians who favor a collective personality, playing the nearly two-hour show in heavy shadow and never speaking to the audience.
The evening’s second selection, “Storm”, from the band’s archly titled new release “Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven”, was typical of GYBE!’s sprawling song patterns: strings sawed as quiet as crickets, joined by slowly unfurling bass lines, then drums and finally guitars swooped in like helicopters, whipping the composition into a multi-directional frenzy. One of the group’s titles is “Gathering Storm”, which gives a good indication their compositional mindset.
Visuals flashed the behind the group (six members were seated) from three film projectors and a slide machine, pulsing out grainy and/or blurry black and white images. At times-- especially during the louder sections of the intriguingly titled “Tazer Floyd”---this mixture and sight and sound recalled early, art-damaged Pink Floyd and during “Dead Metheny”, it was possible to detect the influence of modernists like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. GYBE! wisely eschewed the found recordings that make their records difficult to listen to repeatedly (though “bbf3” did employ taped paranoid rantings), instead focusing on expertly crafting the kind of majestic and epic sounds that will likely earn their next D.C. performance an even bigger crowd.
Washington Post, December 2000
