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| God Speed You Black Emperor,
The Scala, London |
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| Live,
Justin Harries,
15 January 2001 |
Rating: F5
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Sometimes things just don’t make sense, one of them being a band as oblique as Godspeed You Black Emperor! Having the clout to sell out a venue such as the Scala for a total for four nights. Last time I looked post rock territory was marked between the boundaries of the community hall and, if lucky, Highbury’s Garage, Audience attendance could hardly be described as heaving, yet here the kids (balding thirtysomethings with beleaguered girlfriends) thronged night after night. No interviews, no force of mass marketing to push them into the limelight, the Godspeed have built up a sizeable audience through good old fashioned hard work.
Where were all these punters when Bark Psychosis needed them?
Supported by Town and Country, who took the fact that they were from Chicago a wee bit too close to the heart. With all acoustic instrumentation that included melodeon and Celeste T & C cut a minimal groove rather too close to other windy city troubadours. Not a damning indictment, hey the world needs more quietly atonal chamber rock, but the results were a tad predictable, robbing an element of low key subversion to result in a bland prettiness further from Morton Feldman but not so dissimilar to that of the Penguin Café Orchestra. Enough of the harping, T 7 C’s genteel repetitiveness worked in the gradual immersion stakes, and blow me down, was not engulfed by audience interaction.
Like T & C, GSYBE! Music worked over a long period of time. From keening violins to full pounding racket, GSYBE! path took time to develop, and boy, they had plenty of it. Two and one half-hours of it to be exact. The band’s music, a combination of countryfied gloom and motoring noise in Joy Division colbat grey, works on such a scale, and, with its incessant troughs and waves a steady balm descended on the whole event. Nine people on stage, not one of them a vocalist, resulting in a lack of focus which reinforced the feeling.
If it all sounds very prog rock then perhaps it was of a sort with goatees instead of capes, these guys thankfully stayed away from the more egotistical knob noodle of the later 70’s. The Maravisu 0rchestra the next generation any one?
19th-22nd November
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