Entry 986 - Godspeed You Black Emperor - Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada

Style: Post-rock

Primary Emotions/Themes: Building a musical structure from nothing and having the world cheer as it is completed and declares its triumphant completion to the masses

Thoughts: It's always amusing what some artists consider an EP and what other artists consider a full length album. Sometimes a full length album will span less than 20 minutes, other times an EP will go nearly an hour long. I have long since stopped trying to make sense of what is what, and just go with whatever the artist recommends at this point.

Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada is an EP by Godspeed You Black Emperor. The record consists of two tracks and totals about thirty minutes in length. The first of these two epics is an appetizer, a preview of the main course so to speak. It consists of the band slowly weaving in and out of powerful climaxes and near silence. 

Moya not only introduces us to what the band's basic structure is, it also incorporates all of the elements that the band intends to explore during this release. Silence. Followed by intense moments of guitars, drums, violins, and chaos all enraptured in a dramatic explosion of sound before the silence takes ahold of our ears once again. It does this in such a profound and calculated way that the music leaves me stunned.

All this though is only the beginning, BBF3 is the main star of the show here. These eighteen minutes of music is perhaps the strongest and most powerful composition that Godspeed ever created... maybe even the best song that post-rock has ever created as a whole.

It follows the same structure as Moya, however there are a few major differences. The first being the ramblings of Blaise Baily Finnegan III and his views on the justice system in the United States of America. The legend has it that the band met this gentleman at some point and asked him to recite his poem to them. 

The poem as it turns out is largely lifted from the lyrics to Virus, which featured Blaise Baily on vocals. I highly doubt that this is the gentleman's real name, but it is amusing to see Iron Maiden lyrics recited in a Godspeed song. Regardless, the inclusion of the ramble lends the song a different air than Moya. It makes things seem a bit more desperate, we are living in a dying world and this is the musical chronicle of it.

The instrumentation also has taken a step up from Moya. Instead of several smaller climaxes, the band builds and builds and builds for the entirety of the first fifteen minutes of the song. It finally erupts into a musical volcano that I have yet to hear the peer of. This is the strongest representation of what post-rock is capable of. The ebb and the flow are perfected here. 

Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada is short in terms of a Godspeed album. Here though, it's not the quantity of the music, but rather the quality of it that makes this my favorite release from the band. This is the album that made me take post-rock seriously.