Critic Reviews
| 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]
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| 90 |
Mojo
Godspeed have taken their by-now familiar elements and rearranged them in often beautiful or surprising ways.
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| 90 |
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.
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| 90 |
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.
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| 90 |
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.
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| 90 |
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.
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| 80 |
Magnet
It's exquisitely constructed sound with a sharp punk edge and an anarchist's ear for chaos. [#48, p.92]
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| 80 |
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.
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| 80 |
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.
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| 80 |
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.
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| 60 |
Nude As The News
This ambient/noise/psychedelic amalgam is limited by tedious repetition and a lack of emotional focus.
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| 60 |
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.
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| 50 |
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]
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