Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (2LP)

Real innovation in a leaderless nontet must be geologically slow. Lift Your Skinny Fists succeeds precisely because it utilizes Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s numbers in a way that previous works did not. Lift opens up its sound to various voices and influences within the collective, letting moments of pop/rock, ambient and even hip-hop blossom where once there was only gravelly symphonics and aural landscape. Those moments were, for me, nothing short of thrilling. This is why Lift shouldn’t be accused of merely preaching to the converted fan who has long since accepted the grandiosity of their sound and the vague rhetoric of their dissent. They show signs of doing what they condemn the world for not doing: changing, evolving, experimenting with new approaches, growing.