Chroniques et points de vue:

From Amazon.co.uk:
lt's hard to imagine this disc coming out of Montreal or, really, any urban habitat. The post-rock instrumentals on f#a#(infinity symbol), distantly related to the sounds made by the Australian band Dirty Three, serve as walking music for a loner hoping to hitch a ride in the middle of the Arizona desert and dealing with the inevitability of another night in coyote territory. Godspeed's swelling array of guitars, bagpipes, cellos, violins, trumpets, and drums is riveted together with an understated hope that is emotionally clutching, often devastating. This core of heavy Midwestern stoicism, saturated with waves of strings, hardcore interludes, and ripples of Morricone guitar, leaves listeners with the understanding that there is no escape from the badlands that surround and permeate us. --Michael Woodring

From :
0n first listen, Montreal collective Godspeed You Black Emperor sounds familiar, like sonic-landscape architects the Dirty Three. But pay closer attention to this debut full-length and you'll find something much more compelling: G.Y.B.E. mix found sounds, voices, lilting string sections, and musique concrète into structures that tell a story. With each listen, a new plot twist is unraveled, a new movie sample identified--you start to listen closely with headphones to pick up new subtleties you couldn't hear previously. Three tracks, a bit over an hour, of great music that defies categorization. --Jason Verlinde

Amazon.ca:
Septième album solo de Michel Rivard, Le Goût de l'eau… et Autres Chansons naïves, paru en 1992, séduit rapidement avec ses ritournelles enjôleuses. L'enfant chéri de la chanson québécoise délaisse les synthétiseurs d'Un trou dans les nuages pour revenir à ses premières amours : les guitares acoustiques. Dans les mains agiles de Rick Hayworth, complice de toujours, elles côtoient l'autoharpe, la mandoline et la guitare hawaïenne.

Le résultat n'est pas pour autant exotique : on a affaire à 11 chansons bien ficelées, à des musiques à la fois simples et denses qui savent soutenir les textes intelligents de Rivard. Le ton se fait grave dans 'L'0ubli', brillant et émouvant hommage au cinéaste québécois Claude Jutra : 'll notait tout dans un carnet/Le nom des gens l'odeur des choses/Et quand le vent virait morose/Pour se souvenir il relisait/Mais il voyait entre les lignes grandir le trou blanc de l'oubli'.

Qu'il parle de l'enfance ('La Lune d'automne', 'Tu peux dormir', 'Bille de verre') ou des réflexions d'un chien sur la plage ('Sourire de chien'), Michel Rivard nous sert un album rempli de charme et d'humour qui fait la part belle à la nostalgie. À écouter la fenêtre ouverte, la tête dans les souvenirs d'enfance. --Yannick Duguay









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Note: - Silent rage
This band using the same technique in repetition like John Cage or Edgar Varese to create a group musical ideas which build in tempo like a tidal wave that eventually crashes down on you with the final note. Soft but at the same time angry. Such mighty crescendos! Music that will make you weep. Aural music for the senses.

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Note: - beautiful apocalypse
Godspeed you black emperor! are perhaps the most interesting and diverse of the contemporary experimental acts. This album celebrates their ability to create beautiful, atmospheric sound, and also real honest rock music. f#a# could be described as the soundtrack to the apocalypse, with the opening lyrics, and the gloomy, even depressing sounds found in east hastings. One shouldn't think of these three tracks as seperate works, i think, for there is a general mood for the whole album. As I've said, f#a# can become a little depressing at times (especially when played repeatedly in midwinter), seeing as its main theme is the end of the world. What I feel saves the album from being overwhelmingly depressed is Godspeed's ability to really rock. This adds an optimistic element to the otherwise pessimistic piece. The build ups in the middle of East Hastings and at the end of Providence are remarkably well constructed, although simple. With f#a#, Godspeed demonstrate their ability to compose powerful rock music out of seemingly simple melodies or loops. Their ability to rock reassures me that Godspeed are not entirely dead with depression and it is this ability that many of Kranky's other bands lack.
I must give some credit, however, to the way that these more dark parts of the album are able to create pure emotion and a sense of beautiful melancholy. The commentary of Dead Flag Blues creates a lanscape for the imagination, with its simple, powerful imagery - "a car's on fire but there's no driver at the wheel". For the amazingly alternative style that they have made for themselves, Godspeed certainly deserve more attention than they have received. This is good music, but be careful not to overdose.

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Note: - * Soundtrack to a film you imagine. ...
This dreary, visionless film contains three songs filled with fear, regret, desire, and hope. I know this because there is a blueprint inside the booklet marking these different feelings (fig. 3a). Also there is some feelings in between such as anxiety, helplessness, and self-doubt. I couldn't have explained it better myself. If you really get into the music, you will feel all these things and more. Each song is longer than the preceeding song, adding up to about 65 minutes running time.
If you listen to this with full attention, it will create images in your head. It seems so much like a film -- only you imgine your own visuals so it can be whatever you want. The first song, "The Dead Flag Blues" starts off with a narrator and he is heard a bit later in the song too. For me, this guy is walking around a city that has been destroyed and is slowly making his way to the last remaining corner of the earth. He is trying to make the best of the situation, he says "The skyline was beautiful on fire..." after a while you hear a train go by, i picture he went into the train and fell asleep for many long, cold, rainy hours. Then the dreary, dismal, sorrowful, crying string instruments consume the atmosphere. This is probably one of the most depressing songs i've ever heard. (on the most depressing cd I've ever heard). While listening to it you might just feel like crawling into a sewer and crying or hanging yourself. This song doesn't even have any up-tempo musical climaxes like most godspeed songs do. At the end however, there is a glimmer of hope! this nice nostalgic, faded, twisted old-western melody feels very hopeful.

"East Hastings" has some musical climaxes and more clear melodies. Eerie silences lead up to the one main climax in the middle, which is overwhelmingly powerful, and creeps up unexpectedly and backs away just as fast. This song mostly portrays fear.

"Providence" contains a lot of subtle, faint melodies, and even though the idea this is the "Soundtrack to the apocalypse" has been tired out, this song really does have that feeling, mostly helplessness and regret in the beginning, leading to hope, fear and others. this song has truly an epic feel to it, with the perfect opener and sections leading into each other that wouldn't sound better any other way to build up these feelings and ideas. This song definitely has some interesting things such as echoed, distant, obscured vocal sections (there arent really vocals on this cd though) and well done percussion work in two different areas. It may seem to be incoherent and going all over the place, but it really makes sense in a poignant way.

Is this rock music? who knows. I've always thought of GYBE as a mix in between rock and orchestra, actually leaning a bit more towards orchestra because of the instruments used (violins/cellos along with guitars mostly) and the songwriting techniques. Orchestra with a much darker twist than you've ever heard before.

I don't feel I've descibed as much as I really feel when listening to this cd, it is a truly unexplainable experience and you must hear it for yourself!

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Note: - certainly not pop music
This is one of the darkest ambient records I have ever heard. Maybe ambient isn't the right word, since the band does throw down and makes quite a ruckus once in a while, but for the most part you get drift and atmosphere, inky dark. On a cloudy day or at dusk, when it is quiet, get comfy and throw this on. It will mess with your soul and make you think.

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Note: - * Welcome to dot com am/pm mega market ...
We would like to advise our customers that any individuals offering to pump opinions, wash minds, or solicit ideologies, is not employed by, or associated with this band. Thank you for listening to Godspeed you Black Emperor!, and have a pleasant day.

What I find horribly lacking in all these reviews is any cognizance of the fact that Godspeed is being *ironic* with their soundclips. Perhaps this isn't immediately obvious from _F#A#inifinity_ alone. But it certainly strikes me that while the tone of the man in "Dead Flag Blues" is appropriate to Godspeed's music, he is not meant to be taken seriously, any more than GYBE! are seriously advocating Arco am/pm mini market in _Skinny Fists_...or, for that matter, attempting to deride the 'preacher man' in "Providence," on this album. It is important to remember that they are a Canadian, not American band, and that notions of government corruption and bleak conspiracy are somewhat less well founded or regarded than if this band hailed from south of the border. On Skinny Fists, they have chosen clips that are more obviously self-parodying, to make sure that people don't associate them with the words in their songs-- for instance, sticking fingers in babies' eyes, or a nutcase preacher on a mission to God, wherein the successful will think they are mad, and believe they have gone insane. Don't be fooled by the earnestness of their speakers-- they don't speak for the band.

This is not to say that they do not have a beauty of their own, which is, possibly, the point. Godspeed strips these people of their meaning, but leaves the beauty of their words and intonation intact-- the meaning of form without substance. Godspeed is a band of emotion and beauty, and they find souls of kindred spirit in those whose opinions are to some degree laughable, yet whose sentiment is so intense that it is hard to laugh at them; similarly, they quote those whose sentiment is so false and shallow, compared to the intensity of GYBE's music, that despite their mainstream acceptability, one has to laugh at them-- Arco Am/pm and "so says the preacher man, but I don't go by what he says".

I like this album a lot, but I like Godspeed as a band even more. Skinny Fists is better than this; it achieves heights that this CD doesn't even strive for. That said, _F#A#infinity_ has its moments of glory, and is distinct from _Skinny Fists_ in that it has moments of joy, not just glory and extremity; it is not redundant with _Skinny Fists_, nor does it fail to be a good, moving work. But with _Skinny Fists_, I feel the need to drop what I'm doing, scrunch up my face, and *feel* during the cresendos, sometimes to the point of crying; being 'good' just isn't enough for post rock, or this band in particular. Godspeed knows how to resonate at the level of your very soul, so simply resonating, simply being enjoyable, simply being interesting and pleasing to the ear, is faint praise. I would say this goes part way toward the raw, wrenching quality that the best indie and post rock groups can effect with pure instrumentation, but the strength of this album is in other areas. It's wrenching enough to impress someone who's never heard Blonde Redhead, Sigur Ros, or Mogwai, and does enough interesting things with rhythm and melody enough to impress someone who hasn't heard Tortoise or Lateduster, but doesn't do either quite as well as the masters (in whom I include Godspeed, just not this album). Perhaps if I was your typical Amazon[.com] reviewer, I'd give this 5 stars, but I regard that as inflation.