Constellation Records Discussion - aka Godspeed You! Black Emperor and friends

[Helping Friendly Book]

This thread is for talking about Constellation Records and the multiple bands on there (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Silver Mt. Zion, Fly Pan-Am, etc.) They have a lot of great bands and solo artists in general, so I thought this might make for a good thread. What do you guys think about Constellation?

 

[Let it burn to fuckin ash]

You had me at godspeed!

Not sure about the label, but any any song and album that G!SYBE made after "Sleep" from LYSFLATH, stunk. They ended up sounding like walmart mogwai...i swear it happens halfway through that album. For every song prior to Sleep, they were arty and unique and interesting and more than just tryhard film music.

I love them. But I hate what they became.

 

[Helping Friendly Book]

You had me at godspeed!

Not sure about the label, but any any song and album that G!SYBE made after "Sleep" from LYSFLATH, stunk. They ended up sounding like walmart mogwai...i swear it happens halfway through that album. For every song prior to Sleep, they were arty and unique and interesting and more than just tryhard film music.

I love them. But I hate what they became.

Interesting perspective to have about them. Me personally, I quite like nearly everything Godspeed has done besides Luciferian Towers. Yanqui U.X.O, 'Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!' and 'Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress' are absolute beasts when they come to their sound, especially Asunder, which basically becomes a drone metal song in the middle between “Lamb’s Breath” and “Asunder, Sweet” before giving way into this soaring melodic sledgehammer in “Piss Crowns are Trebled”. I can’t personally see them as a “Walmart Mogwai”, as Mogwai themselves are quite a different band then Godspeed, but I do see how some aspects of Godspeed can be perceived as being some sort of a copy of Mogwai.

 

[Gian-Luca Caluga]

I saw Silver Mt. Zion And The La La Lads or whatever the fuck they were called that week a bunch of times 20 or so years ago; I think they were really closely involved with Capsule, the org who do Supersonic Fest every year in Birmingham. Honestly, the gigs were full of Wire-reading wankers back then, I can't imagine how bad it would be now.

Anyway, yeah, it's all good music to seduce English Lit. student girls to.

 

[Tom Nook's Gloryhole]

I'll go on to say Godspeed's output was great up until their career hiatus. Since then they became absolute fucking faggots creating music that's almost a parody of their output. I genuinely preferred elements of A Silver Mt Zion (however they deserve to fucking hang for changing the name of the band every fucking year) to modern Godspeed but overall it's clear they lost their thunder when they first went into hiatus.

I think my big issue with Godspeed is that their debut is just that fucking good, like it completely NAILS the feeling of living in an apocalyptic hellhole and it's a very good reason why that scene in 28 days later hits so hard. They still had some of the nice crescendos and dreamy music up until Yanqui but none of the 'bite' that made them so special. I get they didn't want to be typecast as end of the world type doomers but they did such a good job of that it sucks that they became current politics faggots.

I saw them last year and it was insane how they walked on stage and people just assumed they were the sound guys. Absolutely NO stage presence whatsoever and without becoming 'that' guy, turning into another fucking faggoty Palestine Protest band was bizarre. Even more insane was that I saw them the day that Hezbullah was bombing the living shit out of Israel and I was watching the missiles drop as I was getting ready for the concert and realising that I might get out of the concert and Israel isn't a thing anymore. They still did their ra-rah Palestine and mentioned their album is about the amount of dead Palestinian kids and it really stuck in my mouth as something super out of touch.