Post-rock is generally verbose. It’s often unnecessarily complicated and the supposed emotional transcendence is habitually, well, mythical. A cataclysmic crescendo without heart is meaningless – no matter how you get there. The genre was flourishing in the mid-’00s, but when online magazine The Silent Ballet began to die, so did many of the genre’s stalwarts – Joy Wants Eternity, Caspian, pg.lost, Balmorhea, The Evpatoria Report and Jeniferever. People stopped caring. People stopped sharing the music. The passion died. The artists moved on, those who stayed behind were largely ignored.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor are perhaps the exception that proves the rule. There’s no arguing that the Montreal outfit are the most revered of the genre. Case in point: their 1994 cassette All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling, which was limited to 33 copies and has been legitimately heard by next to no-one, is the most valuable prize any online music community can fantasise of. Apparently the music itself is awful, the band themselves don’t align with it, but no one cares. They just want to hear it, simply because they can’t. Humanity’s fascination with the unattainable is a peculiar beast.
On Monday night the stage was illuminated with one of the most impressive visual shows seen in recent times. Private government documents, ghostly deer in the headlights and ghastly fires all accompanied the nine-song setlist (which approached two hours in length). The music of the night was dominated by the four tracks from 2015’s ‘Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress’, alongside older favourites such as Mladic (from 2012’s ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!) and Moya (from 1999’s Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada EP).
There was not a single word spoken to the sold-out crowd. Largely, there was next to no acknowledgment of the crowd whatsoever, with the majority of the band sitting within a circle facing only each other. There would be no encore. As they one-by-one slinked off the stage, the crowd, overwhelmed but overjoyed, began to welcome the inevitable silence. Perhaps that’s the intrinsic beauty of music: a rare escape from the deafening silence of the world we inhabit.
Loved: Epiphanies.
Hated: White dudes with dreadlocks coming to the show late and getting in my way while they dickheaded-ly tried to find their seats.
Drank: Nostalgia, it burned.
BY TYSON WRAY
