“IF YOU NEED SOMEONE TO SEARCH AND DESTROY, LET ME SAVE YOU THE TROUBLE, HERE I AM”

On The New Godspeed Record

Ceasefire Now, Free Palestine

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The problem of post-rock is often about context - no lyrics mean that listeners have to import their own sense of what a particular band is making music about. To listen to post-rock is an act of interpretation - it is a kind of reading. 

One thing that’s so distinctive about Godspeed is the ways in which even without lyrics the meaning and frame of their records is always immediately clear. The time spent on the liner notes for each album, the album art, the field recordings, the film played at live shows are all about making sure that the band can’t be misread.

The latest album "NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD" refers to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which is quickly spiralling outward as the same mechanisms of death rain down on Lebanon too. The title forces you as a listener to confront the mundane problem of “hey what’s this new record” with the brutal truth that, no matter when you listen, no matter when you’ve come across this album, the title is already wrong, already a grave underestimation of the scale of loss. 

The official death toll as of time of writing, (which is the afternoon of Oct 13th, 2024) is 42,979 dead in Palestine. This is, of course, still a wildly inaccurate figure. When you read this, it won’t have stayed at this level. Letters from healthcare workers in Gaza point out that the real death toll is thousands upon thousands of deaths higher than is reported. The letter that was written by UK doctors to Prime Minister Keir Starmer puts it like this: 

It is impossible to know the true death toll in Gaza. The Ministry of Health figure of approximately 40,000 Palestinians killed refers only to the number of identified bodies, but while working in Gaza we bore witness to untold numbers of unidentified bodies, many of them truly unidentifiable due to the extent of damage caused. A correspondence piece in The Lancet, one of Britain’s leading medical journals, estimated that the true figure could be 186,000, reflecting the scale of indirect and unrecorded deaths that have inevitably occurred due to the destruction of the healthcare system. 

This is a horror in which all of us are enmeshed. According to the Campaign Against The Arms Trade, the UK government has granted arms export licenses to Israel amounting to around $700 million since 2008. Components for F-16 and F-35 aircraft that are dropping bombs on children are made in the UK (and acts of sabotage against factories like this are an essential tactic for the resistance). What is the role of art, the role of a band like this in the face of the nightmare of the present? 

Ultimately the record suggests that for Godspeed, the answer is to do what they’ve always done, to reiterate and rebuild upon the same formal structures. Drone pieces, long songs that are made up of movements that lead into crescendos and tight shifts of emotional range and dynamics. I got to see the band live for the first time this month. They came onto the stage without  a word, played for two hours straight and departed with a wave. Two drummers, three guitarists, a violinist and a lot of bass. Yeah, it’s them again. 

One of the first things that always appears on the screens when they perform is the scratchy lettering of a single word: HOPE. It’s a crucial part of a symbol that is almost their logo - a hammer, with the word emblazoned on the handle. HOPE is not something you feel, HOPE is something you build over decades, by picking up whatever you have to hand (in this case mostly guitars) and making something with the people in the room with you. I love the cover for this record for precisely that reason - it’s a rehearsal space full of abandoned instruments, crockery. No enigmatic photographs like on previous records. It’s a picture of a space in which you can make something, and make it together. 

The title and artwork for this record are about as direct as Godspeed gets but structurally this is very familiar stuff: three long tracks, broken up by shorter drone heavy pieces. That said, this is one of their most accessible and emotionally uplifting records but given urgency and energy by the context to which they are responding. For some die hard fans there may be somehting a little too straightforward here, but some of these songs are the best and heaviest they’ve sounded across their thirty year career. The opening track, SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPOR starts with the sound of a drone before a beautiful, slightly fuzzy guitar line enters. With the violin backing it up, there’s something euphoric here, the sound of a dawning sunrise just about peeking into view. 

This leads into the first of the longer tracks BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD which starts with the sound of explosions in the distance, an echoing guitar like a lament, the sound of wind whipping across an eerie and emptied landscape. When winds blow through demolished buildings, the opening of this track is what it sounds like. We’ve moved from a dawning day into an abandoned night. Things pick up a few minutes in when the drums join in building up a military rhythm but it’s not until about six minutes that the first sense of a big sustain and build start to come in. When it starts to hit it is incredible - there isn’t a band in the world as good as Godspeed at doing this, at layering texture, mood and sound to this kind of triumphant and cathartic highpoint. The final third this amazing guitar line kicks back in, thrumming with menace, the sound of a gleeful dominative war machine.   

RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD is another one of the longer tracks, opening with what sounds almost like a whistle that a child might play with. (There’s an echo in that noise of something like Pendulum music by Steve Reich). The guitar in the opening introduces a simple layering riff, some thumping drums and an almost immediate build. There’s a deluge - rhythm atop of noise over the same patterns of music. And then, after five or six minutes it all stops dead. Simple clean guitar lines before a poem in Spanish from Michele Fiedler Fuentes, written and recorded for the album. The final few lines, in English: 

on our side they were martyrs since before we were even born

the women who tried and were killed for trying

the women who died young, furious, or old, and never saw the sunrise

innocents and children and the tiny bodies that laughed, and were put to sleep forever

and never saw the beauty of the sunrise

The song switches moods - it becomes heartbreakingly sad, elegiac and mournful, both beautiful and tragic before it starts to build again with a furious rhythm in the back stretch. The momentum builds to being almost unbearable, the scale, and speed of the drums driving everything remorselessly forward. What are we headed towards? What do you see on the horizon? Is there something better coming for any of us?

BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL is one of the most chilling songs they’ve recorded in their entire back catalog - humming with a deep menace. The subtle scrape of the violins twisting into the deep sonorous thrum of a jet engine. Open up your wallet once more and see the blood, the cold calculation of accumulation. Death is good business for Raytheon, for Northrop Grumman, for BAE Systems and for every other business that can see only the lines of a stock price chart on a screen full of dead children. This short piece leads into PALE SPECTOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS, a genuinely terrifying track full of doom atmosphere. There’s no trace of the beauty and grace from SUN IS A HOLE here: in the background there are these electronic glitches and a slow menace that escalates through to something so punishing and bleak. Drums sound with the percussive blast of bombs caving in houses and the guitar lines are this pulsing noise of sirens, full of dread. After five minutes there is a clattering racket, the sound of alarm bells, of screams, all the while the drums pounding away in the background. 

And then, all of sudden, comes this glorious string-led melody, sweeping away the chaos with something so stirring and beautiful, that contrasts so strongly with what came before that it reshapes that dread and terror into something far more focused. The alarms become a weapon, a sonic reconfiguration into modes of resistance. The final track is surprisingly short, and once again very direct: GREY RUBBLE - GREEN SHOOTS. 

This track could be seen as an exercise in compression of the form - they take what would ordinarily be a 15 minute multi movement piece and do it in just about half the time. It foregrounds a simple straightforward central melody and layers Sophie Trudeau’s immaculate violin work over the top. After the first high point it becomes something so beautiful - all of the force, the ferocity drops out and you hear the sound of something so fragile and so precious in the ruins left echoing behind. 

Listening to it, I couldn’t help but think of the poet Refaat Alareer, and the final message on his twitter account before he was killed in December along with his brother, his sister and four of his nephews in an airstrike. 

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself–

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

As the final lines of Godspeeds album notes for this record put it, 

war is coming.

don’t give up.

pick a side.

hang on.

love.

*** 

Ceasefire Now.

Free Palestine.