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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed albums.

Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
by godspeed you black emperor!


9.4

based on 13 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 51 votes
Read user comments
Rate this album

Yanqui U.X.O.

The second proper album from the Canadian instrumentalists consists of four independent works(each 18-22 minutes long).... yes, that's 2 songs per CD.

LABEL:	Kranky
RELEASE DATE:	12 September 2000
DISCS:	2 discs
GENRE(S):	Rock, Indie, Alternative, Experimental

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Alternative Press

A massive instrumental effort, as skilled and musical as it is on-the-fly improvised and messy. Seamlessly blending sonic experiments with live group interactions, godspeed saunter through these four extended pieces with ease. [#150, p.94]

Mojo

Godspeed have taken their by-now familiar elements and rearranged them in often beautiful or surprising ways.

Pitchfork

Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven is a massive, achingly beautiful work, alternately elegiac and ferocious. However, Lift plays like an oddly transitional album: much of the first disc presents a refinement of the sound that crystallized on the Slow Riot EP, while the second disc flirts with moments of vertiginous shoegazing, looser rock drumming and reckless crescendos of unalloyed noise. Succinctly, the first disc is easily continuous with their earlier work; the second disc might just be the future.

All Music Guide

The main complaint voiced by critics of Godspeed's music is that their works just repeat the same pattern: start out sparse and slow, build-build-build, crescendo. While there are certainly crescendos, there is no such predictable pattern repeated among the works on Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven -- it's loaded with dynamics, unexpected sections, strong emotions and beauty.

Almost Cool

Not only has the group taken their sound and refined it even more, but even the ambient soundscapes and parts between the actual songs are more well constructed.

Splendid

Essentially, you get one disc on which Godspeed You Black Emperor tinkers with their sound a little bit, and one on which they deliver exactly what you've been expecting. That's a good mix.

Magnet

It's exquisitely constructed sound with a sharp punk edge and an anarchist's ear for chaos. [#48, p.92]

Village Voice

Godspeed's records will either blow your head off or leave you shrugging, depending on where your personal quest for freedom is taking you.

The Onion (A.V. Club)

Godspeed's 1999 knockout Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada EP is a more manageable dose for beginners, but music this audacious and ambitious needs to be heard regardless of the challenges it presents.

MTV.com

From the double album's first echoes of guitar and strings to its droning denouement, godspeed you black emperor! creates a musical soundscape that alternates between flashes of sonic brilliance and moments of quiet ecstasy.

Nude As The News

This ambient/noise/psychedelic amalgam is limited by tedious repetition and a lack of emotional focus.

Neumu.net

Unwinds slowly, slipping between ghosted noise-and-field-recording passages and the sustained explosions of big, bombastic caterwaul that have become Godspeed's signature sound.

The Wire

On earlier releases, the traces of anger, sorrow or despair rippling through the found voices seeded roaring rock improvisations that empathetically rooted and resisted the calamities visited upon them. But the improvising on [Skinny Fists] falls within beat parameters too tightly determined to generate any really useful dissonance. [#200, p.66]

The average user rating for this album is 9.4 (out of 10) based on 51 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Staffan gave it a10:
The most beautiful, apocalyptic and hopeful record ever made. The record really helps when the world just feels cold. This is gonna be my favourite album forever and ever.

naveed Sultan gave it a3:
I can't figure out why everyone thinks this album is mind blowing, I honestly beleive it's waaaaaay behind Sigur Ros and Explosions in the Sky. I don't think i'll be able to grow into it.

David C gave it a10:
Just the most astonishingly beautiful album ever released.

Armand T gave it a10:
Perhaps the greatest album of all time. There is no other band like Godspeed and there never will be.

Jon L gave it a10:
Oh man, albums like this are what make wading through hours of modern indie rock mediocrity worth the plunge. Full of eerie dissonance, deeply moving sections of pure, organic, rollicking emotion, and a bottomless melancholy both hopeful and apocalyptic, nostalgic and foreboding. Insanely, insanely beautiful and human. Possibly the album of the decade.

AView AM gave it a10:
I'd been listening to this album in awe for two straight years. Then I saw it on vinyl in a little record store in Victoria. Needless to say, I snapped it up. Best. Album. Ever.

Kanada gave it a10:
One of those albums that, if people had any taste, would be lauded for years with all sorts of musical, personal, and even spiritual accolades. "Transcendent" is not too strong a word to describe it.

Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven by godspeed you black emperor!

Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
by godspeed you black emperor!