(2015) Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress



Review: 
When Godspeed You! Black Emperor released their debut full-length, 1997’s F♯ A♯ ∞, they burned down the walls separating heaven, purgatory, and hell in the wake of apocalypse. It only took 38 minutes. The album’s championing moment, and maybe the band’s best opening sequence to date, comes in the form of “The Dead Flag Blues”, a deadpan soliloquy about a man’s skepticism of the government and the decline of modern civilization. Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress is Godspeed’s first single LP-length release since then, and as a nearly 20-year gap would suggest, the two records stand at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. F♯ A♯ ∞ weeps violently. Asunder smiles faintly. 
For Godspeed diehards, Asunder is nothing new. 
The band used to play the whole thing live under the working title “Behemoth” and trimmed what little fat there was for the studio version. That means their eschatology has moved from field recordings to doom drone. There’s no war veteran babbling or ARCO AM/PM greeting here. Godspeed has gone the Hemingway route; there are fewer subsections, but the ones that made the cut are tougher. Asunder is polemical in its trudge, drawing out notes the way a politician pauses between words to emphasize their meaning. As with 2012’s Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, Godspeed pulls it off. 
On Asunder, we inch closer to the final renovation of the universe. In the past, Godspeed outlined the end of the world as if it were a fiery consumption engulfing all we knew, so vicious and hopeless that it was best imagined in black and white. Asunder sounds more akin to the Zoroastrian doctrine. Recorded during late 2013 and 2014, it’s a dramatic look at evil once again being destroyed — or perhaps as the one doing the destroying. Slowly, layers peel off and burn, but as they do, the distress of destruction becomes unrecognizable from the relief of peace. It’s there in the album art: The front cover shows sheep grazing in the shadows, unaware of anything more than that moment, and the back sees scratched vermilion American dawn dahlias, like a beloved photo drawn out of storage. 
“ 

Tracklist: 
01 Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!’.flac 
02 Lambs' Breath.flac 
03 Asunder, Sweet.flac 
04 Piss Crowns Are Trebled.flac 

Summary: 
Country: Canada 
Genre: post-rock