Top 25 Albums Of The Decade (#3)

3) GODSPEED YOU BLACK EMPEROR! – Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (2000)

…and I’ll put the exclamation point where I damn well please. It wasn’t too long ago that I made the blanket statement, “No album should ever be longer than forty-five minutes.” And I sort of stand by that, given the attention span of the average human being. It used to be that bands thought of an album as two twenty-to-twenty-five minute halves, accommodating us with an intermission to smoke a cigarette or hit the bong or whatever your listening ritual happens to be. But what about this bad boy—a nearly ninety-minute double album with only four tracks and no singing? And here I thought this was the Skip-Button Generation. “Storm” = 22:32. “Static” = 22:36. “Sleep” = 23:18. “Antennas To Heaven” = 18:58. Nine band members (bass, bass, electric guitar, guitar, guitar, drums, drums, cello, violin). Internal movements within songs with titles such as “Attention… Mon Ami… Fa-Lala-Lala-La-La… [55 St. Laurent]” and “She Dreamt She Was A Bulldozer, She Dreamt She Was Alone In An Empty Field.” I mean, the genre is called post-rock. Post-rock. Does it get any more pretentious than this? The answer is: no, it probably doesn’t. Then again, good music has been pretty fucking pretentious for hundreds of years and nobody said anything about it then. Come to think of it, Lift Your Skinny Dicks (as I affectionately call it) has plenty more in common with a Berlioz symphony than it does with Tortoise or Laughing Stock. And since I have yet to figure out what post-rock actually is (I’ve heard it called “music with long crescendos” or “classical music with rock instruments”), I’m going to pull a Kayo Dot and simply call GY(!)BE(!) “music from a dream.” The longest, most hallucinatory, most whacked out dream you’ve ever had in your life; the kind from which you wake up the next morning thinking you’ve been sleeping for eons and ask, “Can I please go back?” Like a rocket burning up upon re-entry, “Storm” kicks things off with tender violins and french horns before the siding gradually begins to peel off and the nose cone begins to glow orange and suddenly you’re overcome with the most breathtaking, triumphant vision known to man—a view of Earth from two-hundred miles above, serene and fertile and dreadful as you plunge to your own death… and then end up at the Arco AM/PM mini-market. But the album’s real highlight is definitely “Storm,” which begins with some old fart lamenting the gentrification of Coney Island: “They don’t sleep anymore on the beach.” Then it moves to… Oh, to hell with it. I’m not even going to begin describing this song. Either you’re still reading this review or you’ve already navigated away to eBaum’s World. Let me just put it this way: DO NOT play “Sleep” around your dog, unless you’re giving it some kind of Michael Vick pep talk. (I know—that’s not funny. So sue me.) Haunting, tranquil, intense, sublime, life-affirming, death-affirming, mind-altering, crotch-grabbing, seizure-inducing, better-than-whatever-else-you-happen-to-be-listening-to-at-the-moment post-whatever music without a single boring moment. Get it now, or live life substandardly.