The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · four tracks, two long pieces each followed by a drone · Constellation · about 53 minutes
Mode
Instrumental rock as accumulation; two long crescendos for a large ensemble, each answered by a drone
Mythos
Ascent out of catastrophe: a named war passing through dread into a rising, under a hymn’s word and two imperatives
Phase
Four tracks in alternation, long piece, drone, long piece, drone; the dark piece first and the bright second, each roar decaying into held tone
Presentation
Album; four tracks, about fifty-three minutes, two of about twenty minutes and two of about six and a half; no singer and no lyric; on vinyl the two drones on a separate seven-inch record
Register
Three guitars, two basses, two drum kits and violin, from one thin line to all eight in unison; a modal riff, interlocking guitar figures, a reedy drone and a wide one
Scale
Collective force against state power, named in four titles: a general awaiting judgment, the helicopters over a crowd, a fire, the Quebec student spring of 2012
Governing Proposition
A collective returns after ten years with two long pieces it had played in concert before its silence, sets a drone after each, and makes one plan of the four: a single line gathering, player by player, into a mass that moves, and the mass, once it stops, held as tone. The wager of the record is that solidarity can be enacted without a word, by instruments joining, and that four titles, a general, the state’s helicopters, a fire and a city’s spring of protest, are enough to say what the joining is against.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The theme of Mladic is stated thin and alone, a modal line on a single instrument, and the ensemble gathers around it by degrees. Nothing is added that the theme does not carry. Twenty minutes later the same melody is heard pulverised: all eight players in unison on the riff, two drummers together, the guitars and the violin locked into one mass, a sound that seems to stand up in the room. The piece is the distance between those two soundings of one line, and its length is the time the gathering takes.
The record is four tracks in alternation. Two long pieces of about twenty minutes, Mladic and We Drift Like Worried Fire, are each followed by a drone of about six and a half minutes, Their Helicopters’ Sing and Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable. Each pair comes within seconds of the other in length, and the whole runs about fifty-three minutes, three quarters of it in the long pieces. The dark piece comes first and the bright second. The ensemble is three guitars, two basses, two drum kits and violin, with no singer. The record was released by Constellation in Montreal in October 2012, the band’s first album since Yanqui U.X.O. ten years before.
The title names a man. Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general, was arrested in May 2011, the year before the record appeared, and was convicted of genocide and other crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in November 2017. Nothing in the music illustrates him. It is a modal riff driven by many players until it fills the room, and the title makes that force the sound of one war rather than of war in general. The name was in the news when the record appeared; the verdict came five years later.
Movement II
When Mladic ends, the roar does not resolve. It decays into a reedy drone, cold and ominous, held for six and a half minutes and named for the helicopters: the state’s machine above a crowd, heard as a held tone. The drone is not a pause between events. It is what the mass sounds like when it has stopped moving, the same sustained sound with the motion gone out of it, and the record gives it a track of its own.
That separation is the record’s open question. The vinyl edition put the two long pieces on a twelve-inch record and the two drones on a seven-inch beside it, so the band itself issued the album with its long pieces standing apart. The experiment that asks whether the drones are needed was run by the people who made them. In the four tracks as sequenced, the answer is plain: each drone lets twenty minutes of crescendo fall into stillness before the next begins, and without them the two long pieces would meet roar to murmur, with no breath between.
The drones are made with care for timbre, and they are plainer than their role asks. The first is reedy, the last wide and slow; neither has the inner motion of the long pieces, and a listener who hears the record as two crescendos with appendices has the seven-inch to point to. The record’s answer is its sequence: long piece, drone, long piece, drone, each roar given its decay. It is a clear plan and an apt one, and it became the plan the band kept.
Movement III
The second long piece begins small. Guitar figures interlock, each audible, their sum a pattern none of them plays alone, the principle of a gamelan carried by a rock ensemble, and the pattern gathers into a long ascent in a major key. Where Mladic gathered weight, this piece gathers light. It rises more than once, and its last rise is transport, the warm counterpart of the terror twenty minutes before.
It is also the looser piece. Its middle passages plateau, and some are held past their yield; there, minutes could go without the argument going with them. The plateau is the record’s method, the long level approach that makes the arrival count, and this is where the method shows its cost. The piece still arrives, and the arrival answers the dark mode of Mladic with a bright one: the same gathering into mass, turned from dread toward release.
What the two pieces disclose is said by their titles more than by their sound. A general, the helicopters, a fire, a city’s spring: joined to the music, they say that collective force can answer state violence, and that the answer is ecstatic as well as grim. The music enacts half of that, since the solidarity the titles name is heard as players joining, one line becoming eight. The other half, what the force is raised against, the music does not say. It renders a condition, dread passing into defiance, with great exactness, and leaves the naming to four titles.
Movement IV
The band’s previous album, Yanqui U.X.O., had appeared in 2002. A hiatus began in 2003, and the band returned to the stage in 2010 and 2011. This record was its first after the silence, and both long pieces on it had been played in concert in the band’s last period before the hiatus, under working titles. The studio versions of 2012 are the work; the years in which the pieces were shaped on stage were part of its making.
So the inheritance the record turns is the band’s own. The long crescendo for a large ensemble had been its language since 1997, and by 2012 the post-rock crescendo was a proven form, much imitated. What turns is inside the language: the record is heavier and more riff-led than its predecessors, it narrows its palette to the ensemble, with no tape collage, and it sets its drones apart as tracks of their own. The stake was real. A reunion after ten years could have diminished the band, and a record made from pieces already played invited the charge. It was made heavier, not softer, and that is the turn.
The record won the Polaris Music Prize in 2013, Canada’s annual prize for the album of the year, and the prize put it before the national field. It re-established the band, and its plan of long pieces paired with drones became the template of the band’s second period. Beyond the band its pressure is harder to trace: post-rock did not turn because of it. The pressure falls where the record’s matter came from, on the band’s own body of work, which it renewed rather than redirected.
Movement V
The record ends not on a climax but on a held tone. Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable is a drone, wide and slow, named for the maple spring, the Quebec student strike and street protests of 2012, whose name puns on the Arab Spring. Two of the four titles name events of the eighteen months before the record appeared. The last sound is given to stillness, under the name of a spring of protest.
The title gives the record’s argument in four words, a hymn’s word and two imperatives: “’Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!” The long pieces enact the rising it commands, from murmur to roar and from the dark mode to the bright, and in sequence war, surveillance, drift through fire and a city’s spring become a passage from catastrophe toward deliverance. The rising is in the sound; its meaning is laid on by the titles, and drift and ascent are the band’s form on every record. The orders the titles name, the state and its wars, the crowd, the sacred, are bound by one condition, collective force against state power, and held as feeling, with no consciousness in them but the listener’s.
Fourteen years on, the recording survives as issued, whole and in print, and its two long pieces have stayed in the band’s concerts. Its sound is fixed to no technology of its year, and the topical surface of its titles, a general named before his conviction, a strike of 2012, has not dated the condition they point to. What it does not reach, it declined: it returned to its own form from pieces already played, left its meaning to titles over wordless sound, and named more orders than it held. Inside those limits nothing is out of place, and the last sound is its law in the plainest form, mass at rest, held until it stops.
Act III · The Twelve
Inside the two long pieces the subtractive test finds little to cut. Mladic states its modal theme thin and alone, adds the ensemble by degrees and arrives at all eight players in unison on the riff; each stage is needed for the weight of the next. Across the whole the test bites twice. The vinyl edition set the drones apart on a seven-inch record, so the band itself issued its long pieces standing alone; in sequence each drone lets a roar decay into held tone, but the experiment has been run. And the middle of We Drift plateaus, where minutes could go without the argument going with them. Necessity is high in the pieces and moderate across the whole, and that holds the figure.
Score: 7.7 / 10
With no sung word, the disclosure rests on sound and on four titles, and the titles point exactly. A general arrested the year before release names the darkest piece; helicopters, the state’s eye over a crowd, name the first drone; the Quebec student spring of 2012 names the last. Joined to the music they state something that holds: collective force can answer state violence, and the answer is ecstatic as well as grim. The form carries half of it, since the solidarity is enacted by instruments joining. What holds the figure is the other half: the sound renders a condition, dread passing into defiance, and what can be stated is stated by the titles, not by the music.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Elevation is the record’s purpose, and its heights are of the first order. The climax of Mladic is terror on the large scale: two drummers together, guitars and violin locked into one mass on a modal riff, a sound that seems to stand up in the room. We Drift reaches the warm sublime: interlocking guitar figures gather into a long major-key ascent that becomes transport, rising more than once. The drones keep a cold, held elevation of their own, the first reedy and ominous, the last wide and slow. What holds the figure is frequency, which the axis counts with height: the peaks come at the ends of long builds, about four in fifty-three minutes, and the approach to each is level by design.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The title promises an ascent, and the long pieces enact rising: from murmur to roar, from the dark mode of Mladic to the major ascent of We Drift. In sequence, war, surveillance, drift through fire and a city’s spring become a passage from catastrophe toward deliverance. Mladic particularises it: a named man and a modal colour, so that the riff becomes the sound of one war rather than of war in general. The rising is built in the sound; its meaning is assigned, borne by titles over music that would carry other names, and drift and ascent are the band’s form on every record. Myth evoked with conviction, and in the sound nearly built.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own. The long crescendo for a large ensemble had been its language since 1997, and both pieces were played in concert before the hiatus. The turn is made inside that language: the record is heavier and more riff-led than its predecessors, narrows its palette to the ensemble, with no tape collage, and sets its drones apart as tracks of their own. The stake was real. A reunion after ten years, from material already played, could have diminished the band; it was made heavier, not softer. What holds the axis well below the bar is the return itself: a wager placed on a crescendo form that the band had proven, and the field had imitated, by 2012.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because what it knows is accumulation. A collective builds from one line to eight players in unison, and the build is the content: the solidarity the titles name is enacted by instruments joining. Mladic keeps its theme while the mass grows around it, so the same melody heard thin and heard pulverised is the piece’s argument about force. We Drift layers small interlocking figures until they become one surge. Played as five-minute songs, these pieces would keep their tunes and lose their meaning. What holds it lower is that the form is not compelled throughout: the band issued the drones on a separable seven-inch, and in the plateaus of We Drift length is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Fourteen years supply the evidence, and it is thinner than the force of the record. Both long pieces have stayed in the band’s concerts, the record won the Polaris Music Prize the year after release, and it is returned to as the start of the band’s second period. The yield on return is chiefly formal: the counterpoint of three guitars in We Drift, the timbres inside the drones, the voicing of the riff in Mladic through the mass. The return is shown in listening more than in a literature of study. What holds the figure is the semantic yield, narrower by design, since an instrumental record titled for events gives back mostly what its titles assign, and a long build loses some force once its arrival is known.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is instrumental rock: the Montreal scene around Constellation and the post-rock the band had helped to found. The intrinsic force is a demonstration that the band’s form could return after a decade heavier and undiluted, its politics carried by titles over wordless sound. Neither was a new possibility for the field, and the pressure falls most on the band’s own body of work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Polaris Prize of 2013 put the record before the national field, it re-established the band, and its plan of long pieces paired with drones became the template of the band’s second period. Beyond the band no redirection can be traced, and that holds the figure where it is.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Survival is weighed on fourteen years. The form survives whole: the recording as issued, with nothing lost. Presence has been continuous, in print and in concert, as the record that began the band’s second period, and it is held as the band’s return rather than its first statement. Its fabric is fixed to no technology of its year; a live ensemble of guitars, drums and violin carries little period sound. The surface fixed to its moment is the titles, a general named before his conviction and a strike of 2012. What holds the figure is the span itself: fourteen years, below works of recent decades that have held a wider public, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Command of the recorded medium is high and load-bearing. The recording keeps eight players legible at extreme density: in the climax of Mladic two drum kits, two basses, three guitars and a violin become one mass without turning to mud, and the riff keeps its contour through the distortion. In We Drift the interlocking guitar parts are arranged so that each figure is audible and their sum is a new pattern, the principle of a gamelan carried into rock. The costs are three, and they are real: a palette narrower than the band’s earlier records, with little colour beyond the ensemble; plateaus in We Drift held past their yield; and drones plainer in sound than their role asks.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs the whole: sustained tone gathering into mass, sound held until it becomes force or decays. The two most distant elements, the unison riff at the climax of Mladic and the slow drone that ends the record, obey it: one is mass in motion, the other mass at rest, and the drone is what the roar becomes when it stops moving. The dark mode of Mladic and the bright ascent of We Drift obey it too, and nothing breaks it. What holds the figure is range: from drone to riff to euphoric ascent it is real but narrow, narrower than that of records holding song, recitation and noise under one law, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The titles name the state and war, in the general and the helicopters; the crowd in protest, in the maple spring; the sacred, in the hallelujah and the ascent; and the natural order, in images. One condition, collective force against state power, binds them, carried in sound as feeling. What holds the figure is that these orders are pointed at more than held: the music does not differ in kind between the piece named for a genocide and the drone named for a student strike. Consciousness is only the listener’s, the family and labour are absent, and history enters as two events.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 8.7, then The Made at 8.5, then The Living Form at 8.4 and The Inner Law at 8.3. Terror at the climax of Mladic and transport in the ascent of We Drift, eight players kept legible at extreme density, a form in which the build is the content and instruments joining enact the solidarity the titles name, and one law, sound held until it becomes force or decays, from the unison riff to the last drone.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: the state and war, the crowd in protest and the sacred are named by titles and bound by one condition as feeling, but they are pointed at more than held, consciousness is only the listener’s, and the family and labour are absent. Below the rest, The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 7.5, where the titles state the meaning the music renders as a condition, and the pressure falls on the band’s own body of work; The Swerve at 7.6, where the record returns to the band’s own form, with pieces played in concert before the hiatus; then The Inevitable at 7.7, where the band issued the drones apart and the plateaus of We Drift could be shortened, and The Bottomless Well at 7.9, where fourteen years show a return chiefly formal.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, The Swerve at 7.6, The Unconcealment at 7.5 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.5 fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met at its threshold: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.5, and The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition meet it exactly; The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 95.3, an average of 7.94 that displays 7.9, and the aggregate places the record in Tier III, a tenth short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins.
Basis · the complete album as released by Constellation in October 2012, four tracks in sequence, two long pieces each followed by a drone, about fifty-three minutes, judged from knowledge of the recording and its reception; no recording, score or sleeve was in hand. The album is the unit; the vinyl edition, with its drones on a separate seven-inch record, and the concert performances of the long pieces before and after release are used only as evidence. The years in which the long pieces were shaped in concert before the hiatus belong to the work’s making. The record has no sung lyric, and any spoken or sampled voice on it is neither quoted nor used; its words are its title and track titles, quoted in wording that is certain. Track lengths are given only roughly. Facts that could not be verified, among them the date and place of first sale, the studio and engineer, the working titles of the long pieces, the band’s response to the prize and the dates and number of its later records, are not given.