Gig review: Godspeed You! Black Emperor at O2 Academy Leeds
The Montreal-born post-rock collective let their music do the talking.
The start of tonight’s performance is very much in line with the famously low-key aesthetic of Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
The eight musicians trickle to the low-lit stage one by one to add their bit to a steadily intensifying drone, which gradually escalates in volume and intensity as the word HOPE – somewhat at odds with the music’s doomy grandeur – flickers, fades and reappears like a candle clinging on in the wind on the large screen behind the band.
That a band this doggedly resistant to the commonly observed doctrines of the music business can sell out venues the size of O2 Academy (with many in the capacity crowd clearly capable of recognising the group’s instrumental epics from the first few bars) is certainly a reason for optimism.
The Montreal-born collective’s music is no longer available on streaming services. They rarely give interviews or agree to have promotional photographs taken and have never made a music video. Vast majority of their compositions are far too long and unorthodox in their slow-burning symphonic structures to be aired on radio.
The group’s operations are rooted in (broadly speaking) leftist policies. Their seminal late 90s and early 2000s albums drew inspiration from post-industrial alienation alongside anti-war and anti-corporate ethos, whilst the title of 2024’s No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead referred to the death toll in Gaza at the time of the album’s conception. Instead of speeches or posturing, however, the band let their music do the talking.
On tonight’s evidence, it is a hugely successful strategy. Keeping with the band’s guiding principle of emphasising the band's communal potency over individual showing off, individual tunes (drawn from all stages of the group’s 30-plus year existence) melt into a seamless sound collage, with a crisply focused sound that allows individual elements – violin, double bass, three guitarists weaving around each other – sparkle amidst the layers of the band’s collective sprawl.
With understated, circularly repeated guitar motifs gradually submerged into steadily escalating drones that have a habit of building into howling crescendos, the band’s epic post-rock (or perhaps chamber- or drone-rock) compositions adhere to a template. However, the flights from lyrical beauty to pummelling, powerfully assertive build-ups never feel like a stale or calculating strategy. Instead, the shifts from minimalistic bruised beauty to tornadoes of near-cacophonous racket communicate the rage, despair, resilience and wary hope that fuel the collective’s output more effectively than even the most eloquent of lyric sheets conceivably could.
The looped, chopped up and treated 16mm footage projected on the large screen behind the band more than makes up for the shortfall of other visual stimuli on offer during a performance where predominantly seated musicians ply their trade on a barely lit stage. It also emphasises the potency of the music. At one particularly striking point, the hypnotically swirling images shift from controlled flames at an oil refinery to the raging infernos of a wildfire as the apocalyptically fiery music accelerates right to the edge of control.
At the conclusion of the remarkably charged, nearly two-hour performance, the footage dissolves and the musicians exit the stage one by one, leaving the equipment to maintain a grindingly insistent, looped death rattle drone in a neat distillation of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s spotlight-averse ethos.