★★★★★
For a few moments, the audience didn't clue in to the fact that Montreal post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor were playing, talking loudly in the pews during a drone while members slowly appeared on stage. But as a film projection started and the band was assembled, a hushed reverence took throughout the church...
- exclaim.ca
2015-06-27
★★★★★
For a band not known for their words, Godspeed You! Black Emperor really do seem to do a lot with their choice of them; from their rare, carefully considered interviews, to their sloganeering statements and the samples of monologues and street recordings that frequently pepper their recorded output.So after four albums (that the group have unleashed on the public at least), one EP, plentiful side projects and two decades, just how does one approach their first record to eschew all of that...
- www.noripcord.com
2015-05-06
★★★★★
Godspeed's latest release is best thought of as a suite of dynamic exploration rather than an album, as its four tracks develop over 40 minutes. The band's signature slow riffs and brutal, unison forces are all present, while it's between these chord changes that the interplay of feedback, overtones, drones and whistles play, against and with, in and out of the bludgeoning drive of the enormous, portentous menhirs of minor melody.
- recordcollectormag.com
2015-04-23
★★★★★
It's weird, isn't it? No, not the way that everyone has forgotten about that life-changing rap album that came out a while ago. I mean, it's weird that Godspeed You! Black Emperor are still kicking around after returning from their seven-year hiatus from terrifying, inspiring and admonishing us.
There's still something so strange and exciting about the anticipation that surrounds a release from one of Canada's most publically conservative exports. Between 1997 and 2002, GY...
- www.thelineofbestfit.com
2015-04-10
★★★★★
The booming waltz shuffle of the opening track 'Peasantry Or 'Light! Inside Of Light!''s overture gives fair warning. This will be no Blue Danube. Notes of the riff dragged out for as long as they can be, huge sound upon huge sound, behemoths crashing against each other. Unstoppable forces meeting immovable objects, the sound of an endless war taking place in space or deep underneath the sea. In other words, massive. What did you expect?
This is GY...
- state.ie
2015-04-10
★★★★★
Twenty-one years have passed since their formation, but Montreal's apocalypse orchestra remain stubbornly outside the mainstream. Yes, there have been overtures from the establishment - 2012 comeback album 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!' saw Godspeed You! Black Emperor awarded Canada's prestigious Polaris Music Prize - but the group chose to give the $30,000 prize money to fund music education in the prisons of their native Quebec, and skipped the awards ceremony, instead issuing a...
- www.nme.com
2015-04-07
★★★★★
"As soon as you find something you're into, it's fed back to you at double the price in a candy-coated distortion of what it is you've experienced in your life. This is even a media cliche now. [...] It's obvious -- if you're not vocal about what you're critical of then you just end up contributing to what it is." - Efrim Manuck to NME, 1999 "I understand that Godspeed is leftish, and that's about it...
- www.tinymixtapes.com
2015-04-06
★★★★★
When Godspeed You! Black Emperor returned from their decade long hiatus with Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! they did so with a collection of reworked and renamed historic material. It was as if they had unfinished business to attend to within the band itself. Not that this prevented their return being any less glorious, and after a series of triumphant gigs and rave reviews the band scooped the Canadian Polaris Music prize "thing"...
- www.musicomh.com
2015-04-07
★★★★★
If Godspeed You! Black Emperor hadn't come along in the back half of the '90s when they did, some other assemblage of heavy hearted anarcho-romantics would have had to huddle together against the gathering storm clouds for them. In their original heyday, you couldn't have dreamed of a more appropriate soundtrack for the encroaching unknown. The Montreal nonet didn't release mere records; they hefted roiling cauldrons of pre-millenium tension...
- www.popmatters.com
2015-04-04
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