Pitchfork

You know what I miss? I miss political rock music. Probably it's out there and I'm looking in all the wrong places. But I know this: Indie rock, always one of the great dissenting voices of American (and British) underground media, has gone virtually silent. In the 1980s, this music was rife with anti-government sentiment, from Black Flag to The Minutemen to Gang of Four to The Dead Kennedys to Elvis Costello. But with the ushering in of ambivalent slacker-rock, political messages became passé and we grew steadily more tolerant of Washington's silent plots. Conspiracy theories soon became kitsch, and now, in the aftermath of X-Files geekdom and September 11th pacifism, there are few better ways to get hipster eyes rolling than by questioning authority. What perfect timing: We've lethargically accepted that Washington is brutally malevolent just as our most wicked administration yet has come to power.

Yay, the most political rock band going right now is Canadian! Thanks, America. Granted, their message is pretty ham-fisted, what with those didactic, overbearing manifestos and ominous woodcuts of skull-faced forefathers chopping off peoples' hands. But Godspeed is at least putting forth some kind of an effort, which is more than can be said for most. I mean, I dig a lot of music, and songs about our girlfriends and our scenes and hating our parents are fine-- sometimes great, even transcendent. But when that's all there is, we have a problem.

So, upfront, that's why I respect Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I just wish their approach was more effective. For one, they're an instrumental band whose political message is carried out through vague and overwrought packaging which merely hints at a greater "something." And their latest offering, Yanqui U.X.O., is vague as ever. We're told that "09-15-00", one of the album's song titles, "is ariel sharon surrounded by 1,000 israeli soldiers marching on al-haram ash-sharif& provoking another intifada." How? The music is simple atmospheric orchestration with no agenda of its own, and as easily reflects a DMV waitroom as Palestinian uprising. And on the back of the sleeve, we're treated to a six-degrees-of-bomb-makers, where Tomahawk cruise missile manufacturers Raytheon Industries are traced, through a twisted labyrinth of corporations to the recording industry's major labels. Briefly: Just because you have a friend who knows an auto mechanic who worked on a car owned by a guy who was the gaffer on the set of She's Having a Baby does not mean you know Kevin Bacon.

Unfortunately, Yanqui's tenebrous finger-pointing isn't its only shortcoming. The band has taken its naysayers' gripes to heart and done away with those moody vocal snippets that not only hinted at deeper protest, but also jolted you awake just as your mind began to wander. And where the hell is the undercurrent? The two discs of 2000's Lift Your Skinny Fists used Godspeed's sweeping, emotional übersuites as a basic centerpiece to the bizarre ambient textures and noise projects which backed them. Meanwhile, Yanqui U.X.O. strips the group to their essentials which, as it just so happens, are not quite essential enough. Ideas are scarce, too-- where Skinny Fists would erupt without warning into a scorching Satriani-esque solo ("Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-Way"), the tracks on Yanqui are content to continue building to bored, satiated endings we can see coming 20 minutes in advance. Couldn't we have some venting? Are we frustrated or just dramatic?

Worse: The record is consumed by a painfully glacial pace. Each song plods endlessly onward toward an inevitable conclusion with no revelation in store for the poor listener, who can only endure these disc-filling five tracks in the hopes that, maybe, just maybe, that one glorious moment will arrive and redeem the interminable wait with a display of power so towering and majestic that it in itself will be a $12 experience. It doesn't. Once, at the end of "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls," the band comes close with a triumphant burst of cinematic melody and Efrim's wailing screwdriver'd guitar. The quarter-hour denouement that precedes it is a long road to travel, though, and with this record's production difficulties, you're slogging through the mud every step of the way.

See, the importance of strong production on a record like this cannot be exaggerated, and I place much of the blame for Yanqui failure to impact on Steve Albini's shoulders. Last year, he turned Mogwai's similar-minded My Father, My King into a raging, five-headed superbeast with precision micing and mixing that brought the music's strongest elements to the fore, resulting in a speaker-rattling detonation of pristine strength. Yanqui is no recreation, or even approximation, of that tunneling force. Here, perhaps because of the number of instruments at hand, or maybe because of the insane over-reverbing, all of the instruments (save the ever-present martial drums) blend together into a kind of murky concordance, often making distinguishing the guitars from the violins an impossibility.

What we're left with, then, is the skeleton of an incredibly original band whose once-driving conviction and determination has been sapped by sluggishness and a lack of invention. It doesn't help that they've spawned countless imitators and saturated the market with uniform side projects. Or that their radical politics, which could be such a defining attribute, are relegated to cardboard inserts. Or that they just keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, hoping for a different result. Someone tell Godspeed that orchestras play all kinds of music and that uprising can take other forms in music than apexes conveying abandonment, loss or apocalypse. Revolt, as I see it, is a beautiful thing, but not this beautiful.