We all love Godspeed You! Black Emperor of course, but did we ever really actually listen properly to the records I wonder. Because in retrospect they're surprisingly hollow. Much like the band's laughably confused and moronically overblown ideological bluster, the records don't really amount to much more than an impressive but meaningless noise which reveals its lack of depth quite shockingly only once it's over. I remember seeing them at the Sussex Arts Club in Brighton when their first album F#A#∞ (1997) was released and being struck by how ironic it was that all of the audience who would loathe Mike Oldfield were basically listening to what at the time amounted to little more than an Oldfield covers band. Anyway, the album was hugely important mainly because it diluted a lot of avant-classical that was being written and recorded by all sorts of interesting people at the time and added a drum kit and electric guitar, thereby making it officially palatable by the indie kids, and to really hook them in the record came with a selection of enigmatic documents and artefacts (the penny crushed under a train wheel was the real clincher) adding a true air of mystery to the whole thing which was incredibly appealing. To open the album with the spoken words "we are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death" should, of course, have been a tongue-in-cheek introduction to heartfelt political rhetoric, but a more humourless band than Godspeed You! Black Emperor I challenge you to find and therefore I fear it really represents the band's own inability to apply logic to their own arguments (which is a great shame because politically I'm in total agreement with their point of view. Except to say that for a band so overtly critical of a corporate world they seem to have a pretty aggressive handle on marketing techniques...). Where the attitude and the approach could have led to something devastating, instead what they delivered is what people insisted and insisted on referring to as "apocalyptic", with rising waves of strings, guitar and drums building to florid but sinister crescendos. It's still got some power, but the simple truth really is that it's Cave-In played by a string section with a little bit of Oldfield for good measure. To be completely honest I still really like it and really rate it, but I simply can't take it seriously and the idea that we all went so crazy about it seems, in retrospect, utterly absurd.
The 1999 mini-LP that followed, Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada, was better, more focussed and, much more than the fuzzy and painfully strained F#A#∞, managed to create the sense of internal tension which is absolutely necessary for this type of build up, break down music to succeed. The two pieces on Slow Riot are more convincing probably because they're more honest in their bombastic nature and as such make a decent argument for a lack of real dramatic subtlety. Where Rachel's gracefully manage to create a sense of the sublime from similar material, Godspeed have always only managed to do the equivalent of stand on a street corner ranting about anarchism, but it's not really a problem when the ranting is this committed.
Far and away the finest record they've made to date is 2000's Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. It's four 20-minute pieces of symphonic art-rock of the most blusteringly pompous kind and in some ways it led to a bizarre reappraisal of prog rock in the music press because they realised that it would be hypocrisy of the most egregious kind to rave about this album and maintain their loathing of prog. Because this is a prog rock record with absolutely no doubt, indeed it's more prog than most prog records. The only difference is that Godspeed's determination to create complex musical structures comes from lofty ambition rather than showing off technical skill. These ebbing and flowing rolling waves of pieces are really impressive, not least because there's an absolute commitment to atmosphere and the whole thing works much better than the previous albums because, for the most part, the band have accepted that they simply don't have the musical imagination or skill to properly utilise the strings as the driver to the music and therefore are much more traditional in their foundation on the materials of rock music. It's all dense and atmospheric stuff, and although there's still an overwhelming sense of being shouted at about the state of the world by a pretentious eleven year old, it's a pretty big achievement.
And so to something so lacking in pretension it represents the diametric opposite of everything Godspeed stand for. I gave away my copy of the first Go-Go's album, Beauty and the Beat, when I thought I had inherited a CD of it, but when I got round to listening to it I discovered that I'd actually only inherited the CD case. So it's straight on to the second, sadly much weaker, album, Vacation (1982). The album gets off to something of a misleading start with the fantastic title song, which is about as bouncy and flippant as pop gets, and that's, of course, a compliment. Thereafter the album is a patchy affair, and unlike the debut album, it's sadly lacking in a sense of excitement or fun (Beauty and the Beat sounds exactly like an impromptu get together of some super-fun-loving young women and is brilliant as a result (as well as having such blistering stuff as 'Our Lips Are Sealed' on it)). Although Vacation is still really bright and cheerful it doesn't have the devil-may-care feel and it sounds too much as if it was a studio bound affair. Jane Wiedlin is still in fine form as a songwriter and there's great stuff here ('Girl of 100 Lists', 'This Old Feeling') and there's a focus on the band as a functioning unit which does show that they had the chops, but ironically it's the ramshackle nature of the first album that feels so sadly lacking. Nevertheless even counting Vacation as less than a total success it still shows that the Go-Go's were one of the truly great pop bands.
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