Luciferian Towers

Luciferian Towers is a better album than Asunder. I’d venture that it’s even better than 2012’s Allelujah! Don’t Bend, Ascend! by virtue of its interludes not being completely disposable. It’s less bold than their earliest and best work (I wish they’d make another double LP one of these days), but it bodes well for their future, and stands as one of the best albums of the year.

Vital, vibrant, and necessary, Luciferian Towers is a stunning addition to Godspeed's storied catalogue.

The band still builds giant sonic structures with guitars, drums, and violins, stretching out into song suites that can last for 15 minutes or more.

The sprawling Montreal ensemble [is] nback at their most spirited, their Weltschmerz poured into wordless music of soaring transcendence and, on occasion, fierce beauty. [Dec 2017, p.91]

The wistful elegance of the music makes Luciferian Towers a peculiarly gorgeous portrayal of our threatening political reality. Xenophobia is on the rise and we seem to be on the brink of nuclear war, but at least we’ve got this album to provide the soundtrack.

This doesn’t disappoint. Undoing A Luciferian Towers opens proceedings and wastes no time in transporting the listener into their world.

It’s fair to say that there is not a piece of music in the GY!BE canon that sounds anything like as optimistic as the compositions here.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor still has a place in this flattened landscape despite its familiarity, its flaws, its limitations. Luciferian Towers is testament to the group’s staying power, an unexpected but welcome declaration of defiance.

The nine-piece evoke America's open spaces in a beautiful bluster of feedback and reverb. [Nov 2017, p.28]

Perhaps out of necessity, the group seem more inspired here than they have in a while, and the result is arguably their best work since their 2000 opus Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven.

If you’re familiar with Godspeed’s work, this is far from a reinvention, but it’s also not a record of mourning, as much of the collective’s music has been described. Instead, it feels more like a call to action and creation, even if only to assemble an hour or so of music.

There's little on this album that would sound out of place on any of their other works, but GY!BE's apocalyptic vision remains as relevant and powerful as ever.

An album full of ugly [moments]. Ugly isn’t bad on a Godspeed record--the “wrong notes” that permeate “Fam/Famine” resonate as our inability to articulate rage--but it does result in an album that’s more bombast than beauty, which, despite the album’s themes of revolution, can make for an especially dissonant listen.

Impeccable as it is, Luciferian Towers has a disappointing lack of fury.

Even though it doesn’t seem like this is the end of this road, the process has already borne fruit in the case of Luciferian Towers and presented a different facade. But it feels there is still ground to cover to reach the end goal, and that is very promising.

Their gentlest to date, 44 minutes of music arranged around a single, dreamy riff/motif. Listen to it on Bandcamp or Spotify without checking out the other stuff that comes with the music and it perhaps seems like a retreat from the sturm und drang of their previous work. But the accompanying words and art to Luciferian Towers posit it as the band’s most politicised set since Yanqui UXO.