Change The Record: Godspeed You! Black Emperor – No Title As Of February 13th 2024 28,340 Dead

Before we get started here, I want to place this at the beginning so everyone reading this article will see it. If you can, please donate here or here. These are relief funds dedicated to helping out those displaced, hurt, or otherwise in peril in Palestine and Gaza due to Israel. Any amount helps. With that out of the way, on with the show.

I don’t think I get very political on here often. You simply don’t get a lot of opportunities to do so when all you do is review music. However, today, politics are unavoidable, as the album I’m reviewing is directly inspired by–and named in reference to–the ongoing genocide in Palestine at the hands of Israel. The title “No Title As Of February 13th 2024 28,340 Dead” is a fantastically, uncomfortably eye-catching name. It’s not only abstract and weird, as you’d expect from an idiosyncratic group like “Godspeed You! Black Emperor” but it’s also so direct that you cannot listen to–or read news about– this album without being confronted by the grim facts at play. You have to reckon with 28,340 dead Palestinians to listen to the album. Of course, that number was accurate as of Feb. 13, 2024, and has only gotten much higher since. At this time, the Palestinian death toll stands at 44,282. The numbers aren’t perfect, and there are almost certainly many more deaths that haven’t been counted, but this is the estimate we have right now.

Let’s talk about the music a bit before we get too caught up in the politics. This is the new album by Canadian post-rock legends “Godspeed You! Black Emperor.” It’s their eighth studio album and ninth total, following  their 2021 return to form, “G_d’s Pee At State’s End!,” an album that pleased many fans after their disappointing 2017 record, “Luciferian Towers.” Personally, I thought “G_d’s Pee” was pretty good–not their best material by a long shot, but you could tell the band still hadn’t lost any of their luster or ability to create a haunting atmosphere and great guitar work. Still, I couldn’t help but feel the band had something even better in them after that album, and “G_d’s Pee” felt more like the pregame to a more career-defining record. 

Despite the build-up I’m putting here, I wouldn’t exactly call “No Title” the record they were building up to. It feels like an album born out of a direct and outraged response to the state of the Israel-Palestine conflict. That said, this doesn’t mean “No Title” is bad because it’s far from that. In fact, it’s probably the best Godspeed You! album since their 2013 comeback record “Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!.”

Unlike the last few Godspeed records, this album doesn’t follow the back-and-forth shorter track to longer track formula, with a five-six minute opener and closer, and the entire middle of the album dedicated to the longer epics, with the exception of a three-minute interlude in between.

Starting with the opener, “SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS,” which rings the album in with droning guitar passages that slowly lead into very jagged and overwhelming guitar riffs. Loud and overpowering, they practically swallow your eardrums, backed up with windy tribal flutes, shaky natural drums, and shakers. The song almost sounds like waking up to a sunset in a bombed-out city–which fits, considering the content at play. It’s almost like a peaceful, hopeful funeral march: music to play to hope things get better, even as you pick up the pieces of right now. 

This hopeful theme does not follow into the next track, “BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD.” Godspeed’s trademark apocalyptic death horns are present, but instead of portending some all-consuming disaster, it’s portending the bombs dropping above you. Harsh guitar shreds in the background that sound like howling wind, and drumming that’s oddly soft and subtle for what feels like roaming through the rubble. The track inevitably transforms into a chaotic and beautiful explosion of electric guitar and horns. Gorgeous but brutal, it feels unrelenting and tragic, especially as it reaches the end. There’s still some hope, but it’s all being caught up in the thundercloud of war, colonization, and death, and all one can do is hang on for dear life.

The next track, “RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD,” is probably one of their most melodic and tuneful tracks of their career. It begins with steady, pounding drums and driving guitar playing around the 3:30 mark, up until the seven-minute mark, where it cools out into a violin-led, mournful section where the guitars turn into sad waves of somber reflection. This slowly builds back up into the driving riffs from earlier, but faster and more urgent, which keeps getting faster and more urgent until it explodes into this reckless, violent, and insane final passage, where the background guitars are screaming so hard they sound like actual human screeching. 

“BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL” serves as a short, pretty violin interlude leading into “PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS.” This track’s title takes aim at white war photographers disinterestedly documenting tragedy. The word spectator is pretty intentional here; it’s not someone in it to help or bring awareness, but someone there to just spectate, to watch over this field of bodies. The song’s drums are powerful and punchy, and the large booms make it feel like everyone is walking into a death march at a single pace. It feels bleak and dystopian, the ravages of war leading innocent Palestinian lives into the dead zone. The guitars are wild and explosive, their outbursts matched by violins leading us into this rubble that was once a home. The ending feels like the title, like I’m a spectator to the carnage that was once here.

The final track, “GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS,” was released as a single before the album’s debut. It consisted mostly of demonic and dark horns played alongside the electric guitar, a dark, uncompromising beginning before peeling the layers back into a more somber, orchestral section of angelic but depressed string. It serves as a soundtrack of rebuilding after everything is over. It’s blue and bleak but not totally hopeless; it’s beautiful, and for once, it feels like the album is opening up the clouds a bit as we look back at everything that just transpired. It’s dark and apocalyptic, and there might not even be a light at the end of the tunnel, but we can honor those we’ve lost in this hellscape by having the hope to believe there is.

This album is undeniably a masterwork of emotion and power, and at many times, it reminded me of my personal favorite Godspeed You! record, “Yanqui UXO,” another album tussling with the brutalities of war, and indeed, it seems like those rockets still fall on rocket falls. The main takeaway you should have here is that Palestine is still being oppressed, genocided, and destroyed by Israel, and this album is here to remind you directly that the body count is only getting higher. Do whatever you can to help out those in Palestine in need. Donate to the links above, spread awareness of the genocide, and protest to force a ceasefire–whatever you can. This review and this album are dedicated to the 44,282 Palestinians killed, the 102,929 injured, the more than 10,000 missing, and the many Palestinians whose fates remain unreported.