Godspeed You Black Emperor Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven CD

Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, the much-anticipated follow-up to Godspeed You Black Emperor's Slow Riot, is a double-disc achievement of four works (each with multiple parts): "Storm," "Static," "Sleep," and "Antennas to Heaven." It is a windfall for any fan of ambient pop, orchestral rock, space rock, or simply lush string arrangements who understands how powerful love, melancholy, and frustration can be. The main complaint voiced by critics of Godspeed's music is that their works just repeat the same pattern: start out sparse and slow, build-build-build, crescendo. While there are certainly crescendos, there is no such predictable pattern repeated among the works on Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven -- it's loaded with dynamics, unexpected sections, strong emotions and beauty.
The album opener, "Storm," is a leap for GYBE! that, alone, makes this release worth getting. It's a rapturous work that rises with a potent melancholy, driven by heartrending emotions. "Storm" vents a powerful frustration (each listener can insert their own reasons why) with majestic screams of strings, guitars, and layers, resulting in a climactic and passionate soaring. It eventually winds down into an exhausted aftermath of piano, underlying drones, and frustrated rants. The second piece, "Static," is a wandering, isolationist piece of bleak expanses shaded with darker emotions, but the remaining two works raise the album back up to the impressive standard set by the opening cut, though with less furor and even more loveliness. "Sleep" opens with an elderly gentleman reminiscing about Coney Island, and his frank and amusing narration briefly recalls the recordings of David Greenberger and scenes from the documentary Vernon, FL. This narration is followed by a slow and melodic piece featuring a pseudo-theremin effect amidst all of the other instrumentation. "Antennas to Heaven" opens with someone playing acoustic guitar, singing "What'll We Do with the Baby-O," soon washed over with sound, which then gives way to a brief chorus of glockenspiels, and on.
During most of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, musical and emotional opposites alternate as regularly, and naturally, as breathing: delicate string work and rock-out guitar and drums, spoken word and walls of sound, gracious and possessed, tip-toes and cliff-diving, dark hallways and blinding sunshine. ~ Joslyn Layne
This two-disc Godspeed You Black Emperor tour de force is considered something of a milestone of the post-rock age. The first disc opens with slowly drifting ambient droning, which gradually begets mournful strings and a distant, pitch-shifted evangelical sermon before an increasingly ominous thudding rock beat, guitars, glockenspiel, distortion, and bass come spiraling in to break things up for an ever-tightening crescendo. The following piece, "Static," is marked by the early arrival of a hauntingly sad melody (yes, an actual melody), followed by slowly accelerating beats and the ghost of a dying bagpipe--one of Emperor's truly majestic moments--which later segues into shopping announcements and more treated distortion.
The second disc starts off with a sample of an old man reminiscing about the long-lost glory days of Coney Island. The music coasts on through the ashes of time from there, drifting with swooping guitars that sound like Yma Sumac vocals, building into crescendo after crescendo, with drums increasing, pounding, and expiring. The last track kicks off with some bluesy folk crooning that then dissolves into an evaporating haze of strings and guitars. By turns operatic, rocked-out, and mournfully apocalyptic, ANTENNAS conjures deep emotions, landscapes, and even socio-political commentary, and some might sincerely argue that it also makes wonderful housecleaning music.Spin (12/00, pp.220-222) - 8 out of 10 - "...An emotionally stirring achievement....camping out around a couple of notes, chugging leisurely...toward a cacophonous climax..."
Q (7/01, p.87) - Included in Q's "50 Heaviest Albums of All Time".
Q (12/00, p.122) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...Orchestral rock elegies...laced with glockenspiels and violins, and bolstered by thunderous drums and scalding guitars....compelling..."
Magnet (1-2/01, p.45) - Included in Magnet's "20 Best Albums of 2000" - "...The music on this double album is very nearly larger than life..."
Magnet (1-2/01, pp.90,92) - "...This isn't your father's prog....An exquisitely constructed sound with a sharp punk edge and an anarchist's ear for chaos. High-concept in a Moby kind of way..."
The Wire (10/00, p.66) - "...[They] disperse through snippets of Coney Island nostalgia, a shopgirl peptalk, an infirm preacher and an ill-tempered, indeterminate buzz drowning in poorly tuned radio static...The improvising...falling within the beat parameters..."
Muzik (11/00, p.121) - 3 out of 5 - "...Impressively ambitious and stupefyingly pompous, it's the perfect antidote to such lickspittle reactionary fripperies as fun or sex."
CMJ (10/30/00, p.5) - "...Evokes thundering waves, sky-shattering storms and other preternatual events of Biblical proportions..."
NME (Magazine) (12/30/00, p.78) - Ranked #16 in NME's "Top 50 Albums Of The Year".
NME (Magazine) (10/14/00, p.40) - 9 out of 10 - "...Extraordinarily powerful and beautiful music....It's a world where ever-spiraling crescendos are detonated by 9 musicians..."