Track Listing

1. Moya
2. BBF3

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38803 in Music
• Released on: 1999-04-06
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .12 pounds

Amazon.com's Best of 1999
This nine-piece Montreal collective sketches large-scale sonic landscapes using everything from strings to samples. Exceedingly plush and atmospheric, Slow Riot funnels a dramatic undercurrent through their music, adding an undeniably cinematic quality--especially in a section featuring the paranoid rants of a street person. The result is a grand and swirling melange with a sweeping scope and an elevating sense of tension. --S. Duda

Amazon.com
Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada may last only half an hour, but in that time it imparts an internal experience akin to that of watching a cast-of-thousands Hollywood epic. Godspeed You Black Emperor! are a Montreal-based nine-piece ensemble that uses massed strings, ringing electric guitars, and martial drums to evoke endless vistas and stir strong emotions. "Moya" opens with a solemn drone overlaid with resonant violin overtones, then builds to a crashing, unapologetically melodramatic climax. The CD's second (and final) selection, "Blaise Bailey Finegan III," is more ambitious. Like a director who grabs his audience's tear ducts with both fists, the group inserts field recordings of a ranting paranoiac between sweeping spaghetti-Western passages that rise to exhilarating multiple crescendos, then fall away to ghostly, echoed violins. --Bill Meyer

Customer Reviews

Utterly Sublime -- A Post-Rock (Mini-)Symphony
If you are one of those people constantly, hungrily on the lookout for music that doesn't sound like everything else -- and you know who you are -- then you need this disc, period. It's a gem that will hold its own special place in your collection. It works on so many levels that regardless of your specific set of tastes, it's virtually guaranteed to fit in somehow, while not really overlapping anything else.

Even if you usually listen to fairly mainstream music, this one is worth branching out for. Oddly enough, for all of its complexity and edginess, this EP is remarkably easy to listen to, and it doesn't need to be listened to over and over before it becomes enjoyable (even though it certainly does bear up well under repeated listening). Put on a pair of good headphones where you won't be bothered by anyone, and just let yourself drift away.

In these two tracks, totalling about 25 minutes, GYBE creates a sweeping, textured, atmospheric musical journey. Slow rumbling tension builds into cathartic crescendos, only to break down again into mournful, pulsating echoes, swirling slowly around a core of raw musical power, winding it up until it is ready to erupt again. Classical instruments combine with rock, while eschewing the musical forms of either. On the second track, the music is interwoven with segments of what seems to be an interview with an anti-government militant. The rants and lectures (which are either disturbing, disturbed, or both, depending on your viewpoint) come and go, rising and falling, waltzing with the accompanying music, pulling together threads of fear, anger, beauty and majesty -- melancholy whimpers and triumphant explosions, all intertwining to create a musical experience that is rich, haunting, unique, satisfying, and perhaps somewhat demented.

GYBE is a genuine breath of fresh air in the current music scene. This is music that needs to be heard. In a word, it's irreplaceable.

Their finest, and one of '99's best
Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada (Kranky, 1999)

Godspeed You Black Emperor! Have been around for a few years now, turning out classical-pop crossover material in relative obscurity and building themselves a small but rabid fan base. The band's aversion to publicity of any sort (motivated not by affectation so much as a deeply left-wing anarchic bent in the Montreal collective that spawned this nine-piece, who go so far as to not even reveal their last names in most cases) has kept them from the audience they fully deserve for their style of music, especially in these days when Cecilia Bartoli is a superstar even in America and Sarah Brightman and Michael Ball are cutting platinum records left and right. There is a great untapped market for pop-informed classical music, and that is exactly what GSYBE! And their legion of spinoffs do. And they haven't done it anywhere any better to date than on the EP Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada.

As with most GSYBE! releases, the number of tracks on the disc is small (two, in this case); unlike most GSYBE! releases, the tracks aren't divided up into smaller pieces. "Moya" and "BBF3" are single, fully-realized long works. This has the effect of giving the EP a greater feeling of unity then other GSYBE! discs; you know you're still listening to the same song at the end of the track that you were at the beginning.

What makes the music stand out from the crowd, aside from the obvious conceit that very few pop bands use the violin and cello as front-row instruments, is the band's incredible sense of dynamic. As with some of the best classical music, often the same phrase crops up again and again in a piece, with only a change in dynamic to keep things fresh. And it never fails here. Everyone was hitting on all cylinders, and the result is two glorious, majestic classical pieces of with more pop sensibility than can be found in any ten boy band producers put together.

(Don't get me wrong, though. I'm not talking "Boston Pops" pop here, not by a longshot. I'm talking sexy, aggressive, channeling-the-spirit-of-Robert-Johnson drum-and-bass manipulated-tape-loop Madonna-dreams-of-being-this-good pop.) **** ½

Satirical intent? I believe so.
The purpose of this review is not to really review the album, but to attempt to clear things up on the BBF3 track's monologue. While reading through the group's official website (http://www.brainwashed.com/godspeed/), I ran across the monologue transcription with the following note:

NOTE: "his" poem which he recites at the end of this monologue is, in fact, not a poem by him at all, but an almost straight recital of the lyrics to virus by iron maiden. "Virus" was written by Blaze Bayley, former Iron Maiden vocalist, but the man on the recording is not actually Blaze.

Now, with that information being shared, I would like to express my opinon upon reading a comment that had written something like "GYBE praised the 9/11 attacks." On the Yanqui U.X.O. album, there is a track entitled "09-15-00." I interpreted this track as a tribute to all the victims. Now, if there were ambient sound clips of people laughing in the background of this track, maybe my opinion would be different, but the song is very sad and mournful.


I'm only 16 years old, so you may just dismiss all the previous information as "stupid" and invalid, but I would appreciate it if you took this review into consideration before immediately deciding that GYBE are strong anti-american stereotypical Canadians.



Now I can go back to being the 16 year old idiot that you may have expected.
OmGZ! I jus lUv DiS aLbUm n StuFF cuz it Iz SooOOoO KeWl.