Godspeed You! Black Emperor, London's Coronet Theatre, gig review: Cinematic and savagely beautiful

The finest band of the post-rock genre

Jochan Embley
Friday 19 August 2016 13:35 BST
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It’s stiflingly hot inside London’s Coronet Theatre as a low, humming drone becomes audible. There’s no-one on the stage and the place remains dimly lit, but to the initiated, this is a sign that the performance has begun. One by one, members of the Quebecois eight-piece wander onto the stage, pick up their instruments and begin adding to the drone.

The tapestry of sound that is created, “Hope Drone”, eventually gives way to the sparse, ominously swung drum beat of “Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!”. The rest of the band soon add a shatteringly loud whir, created by three guitars, two basses, a violinist and a second drummer, launching us into a full rendition of the 2015 album, Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress. It was the band’s second post-hiatus release, following seven years of absence between 2003 and 2010 - a time in which their status as the quintessential post-rock band became cemented, thanks chiefly to two astounding albums and the adoption of a mysterious, publicity-shy, politically ambiguous group persona.

Godspeed have often described the music they make as punk rock – something that’s certainly true in ethos, if not in structure, which eschews the genre’s often straightforward approach. In fact, in the two drone movements from Asunder… that we hear here – “Lambs’ Breath” and “Asunder, Sweet” – the loose yet commonly focused improvisations suggest that we’re not too far away from free jazz.

“Piss Crowns are Trebled” is savagely beautiful. Building, as a lot of Godspeed songs do, for close to 15 minutes, it’s first propelled by military-sounding drumming and foreboding guitar work, before breaking into an almost euphoric crescendo. It’s a testament to both the sound engineering and Godspeed’s songwriting that the nuance of these movements is not lost beneath the weight of sound they create – the violin playing of Sophie Trudeau, for example, which is eerie, unsettling and tender, could so easily be lost, but thankfully is not.

Throughout the gig, a film reel, operated by hand off-stage, is projected onto a screen behind the band. It’s a vital component of the performance – it seems natural when Godspeed’s music is so cinematic. During “Dead Metheny”, a movement from the band’s 1997 debut album, F# A# ∞, we see fractured footage of train journeys through deserted, snow-covered industrial towns and dour landscapes, seemingly with no beginning or end, just interminable middle. And during “Buildings”, which moves between slowly soaring guitars and contemplative arpeggios, the film shows empty, half-finished tower blocks, interspersed by footage of the booming stock exchange. Godspeed was born within a society that had a gleaming façade of economic prosperity and technological progression, but it was a façade which masked rotten innards. It’s a theme they often explore, and in this performance of “Buildings” it is compellingly exhibited.

Time and time again tonight, Godspeed proved why they are the finest band of the post-rock genre. It’s the way they move between quiet and loud, between playing with the grim elegance of a vulture circling at night, to delivering all the might and fury of a freight train ploughing through a thunderstorm, without so much as a stutter, that sets them above the rest.

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