Godspeed You Black Emperor

The stage is in darkness, the air has been shattering from the din for what feels like forever, the world is ending, and the only people left alive to sing it to sleep are a demolition crew of guitarists to wear the weeds and several string players to administer last rites. Welcome to Godspeed You, Black Emperor! – but don’t despair. As the projection flashing overhead says (the only verbal advice we will be given over the next 2 hours), “Hope.”

As skyscrapers, lightning storms, and oceans blaze above them in lieu of further communiques, it becomes clear that this wordless, relentless music is in desperate love/hate with planet earth, testing the boundaries of its ugliness and majesty; it’s Debussy strings over the harsh music concrete of autobahns, deathless beauty juxtaposed with harrowing sorrow, Thom Yorke’s cataclysmic headache expressed via My Bloody Valentine pedal-and-ebow bloodlettings. But for all the knife-edge dynamics, tonight is about ecstasy, not despair, and even the most violent and extreme of their gestures is essentially heart-shaped: or, as their liner notes once had it (on ‘00’s Levez Vos Skinny Fists..), they’re pirouetting awkwardly in the general direction of hope & joy. The sheer noise of them is incredible, the sonic boom of a hundred airliner takeoffs underscored by the screaming of a hundred orchestras, lit up by a hundred glittering firmaments. As for their two (!) thundering, clattering drummers, any band with only one is now doomed to sound halfhearted, anaemic. We spend over two hours on seat’s edge, breathless, hearts in mouths, and hardly feel it pass.

As the three standing ovations they received might suggest: one of the best gigs, ever.