Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

This is not an album in any conventional sense. It is four pieces of music, each roughly twenty minutes long, built from strings, guitars, piano, drums, and tape recordings of strangers' voices, assembled by a nine-piece Montreal collective who gave no interviews, appeared in no photographs, and refused to be identified individually on their own records. Godspeed You! Black Emperor recorded the whole thing at Chemical Sound Studios in Toronto in nine days in February 2000, drawing from material they had been developing over years of constant touring across North America and Europe. The tape manipulations and field recordings that frame the pieces had been accumulated over four years on the road.

The band's politics, broadly anarchist and deeply skeptical of American empire, are embedded in the fabric of the music. The only voices are sampled fragments, including a man preaching at what sounds like a roadside in the American south, a child speaking over a fairground ride, and an AM/PM convenience store announcement. These moments of ordinary American life drift through the orchestral swell and give the record its specific grief, the feeling of watching something enormous and beautiful and damaged from very close up.

There is nothing else to compare this to. The four pieces, titled "Storm," "Static," "Sleep," and "Antennas to Heaven," each build from near-silence to something that can only be described as overwhelming, then recede again, then rebuild. Experienced properly, with the room to itself and the volume up, this record changes the way you hear music for a while afterward. Set aside ninety minutes. Do not do anything else.