The latest Godspeed LP feels significant for several reasons. With its release, the band’s post-revival albums now outnumber their original run of three, solidifying this second phase of their discography as un-ignorable. The album also marks Godspeed’s return to shortwave radio samples and field recordings—largely absent from their music since 2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists…. Most importantly, it’s been heralded as a return to the impossibly high form of their early work.
That last point is both dubious and subjective—and I’d contest that the maligned “Luciferian Towers” and Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress are far from the duds naysayers would have you believe. Asunder… is especially overlooked, replicating the fury of Godspeed’s live sets in a way that no other studio effort has quite managed.
What G_d’s Pee does do is interrupt the one-upmanship (and one-notemanship) of their discography. Revival albums have been incrementally louder and more bombastic—at the expense of nuance, variety, and that tremulous half-hope that suffuses the old stuff. Many listeners like a band’s discography to feel in conversation with itself; elaborating, contradicting and offering something fresh with every release. It’s no wonder the fatigue had set in for those guys.
G_d’s Pee touches on new territories and unexplored moods. It’s the first LP they’ve released that feels properly post-Bush (don’t ask me how—it just does). Considering Dubya stepped down in 2009, that’s a long sulk to come out of. The album responds to contemporary concerns, feeling right at home in a world where the response we must offer to global health emergencies is to sit around in our pants for a year. Committed to “waiting for the end”, as Godspeed put it, we can only look with bemused distance and seek a unifying light in the darkening hours of our species.
The band still don’t arrange pieces with the intricacy they used to—but their grander and more direct recent style rouses without being hokey. You may have long dismissed Godspeed as ‘crescendo-core’—but that reductive take is informed by twenty years of shite imitators. This band remain among the best in their field and, twenty-five years down the line, are yet to significantly compromise.
G_d’s Pee is available for purchase and streaming here.
Words: Andrew O’Keefe