Review: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Troxy.

What with a sticky carpet coating the floor of a room which feels decidedly wider than it does long, on tonight of all nights, Stepney’s Troxy strikingly recalls the loveably cruddy Centre Stage at Butlin’s, Minehead. Making the evening feel like even more of a throwback to the days of All Tomorrow’s Parties’ left-field promotional omnipotence is, needless to say, the fact that onetime curators and Canadian avant-garde magi Godspeed You! Black Emperor are in E1 to themselves promote their sixth full-length effort, “Luciferian Towers”.

Frequently remarked upon for its remarkably optimistic timbres, whereas the montréalais ensemble may once have seemed a suitably morbid proposition for Hallowe’en, conversely, such is the hopeful disposition of their latest that circumstantial gravity outweighs seasonal gimmickry. For as the dense, intense drone that hums about the building is masterfully transmogrified into traditional opener Hope Drone, members emerging one by one, the evening instantly takes on an atypical context: global politics have, as goes without saying, changed dramatically – if not irrevocably – since they were last in London only yesteryear, and as the flickering etching of the word ‘HOPE’ consumes the immense screen hung from the rafters of this former cinema, it takes on an altogether more paramount importance. Without this, we now have nothing, and Godspeed seem to be acutely cognisant of this grim reality…

This is made translucently manifest in “Luciferian Towers” and, counterintuitively perhaps, the more despairing reality becomes, the less despondent – if all the more indispensable – Godspeed sound. The majority of Karl Lemieux’ 16mm projections may be a reassuring constant tonight, ascending shots of skyscrapers and the fidgeting of fluctuating stocks as per always peppering the aforesaid screen beyond the band, although the locomotive visuals which punctuate the evening serve, increasingly, as a kind of leitmotif; a signifier of how they’re forever moving, and forwards. Yet rarely have they done so with the animated momentum of their most recent suite, and so for all of Mladic’s towering Asiatic tonalities, it tonight makes for rather more of a prologue than a centrepiece.

It’s thus when the tripartite Bosses Hang stirs that Godspeed begin their unbending ascent, proffering the much-needed reminder that change can be for the better, rather than the ineffably worse, as they do so. With grace and guile likewise, its stadium-deserving strains don’t sound altogether dissimilar to so much of Urban Hymns, Sophie Trudeau’s strings becoming increasingly fulcral as the piece wears on, if never thin. Indeed, it’s tonight’s rousing standout; a call not to arms but against inaction, and the outcome is not only most welcome, but also surprisingly emotional. Wrists of all shapes, sizes and circumferences are raised skywards in exhilarated rapture, irrepressible smiles crack throughout the stalls, and somewhere or other, there’s probably a pestilent something in someone’s eye causing some kind of faintly lachrymose reaction. Only infrequently, if ever in their entire history, have Godspeed proven so unreservedly vibrant…

Thus although Lemieux’ invariable visuals provide a considerable degree of familiarity, a thirst for adventure, or venturing into the comparatively positive territories of “Luciferian Towers” is not only noticed, but so too sated throughout what is a starker, less dark and more distinct, song-based set. There’s still no hope of patter, but you get the picture; and it’s one that, for the most part, is infinitely less bleak than it has been in the past.

Of course, at their core, they remain the majestic outfit we’ve come to know, love and venerate, continuing to exhibit a musicianship seldom witnessed outside auditoria of typically classical persuasions, played upon instruments which – but for double bass, violin and the odd transitory blurt of brass during Undoing a Luciferian Towers – are totally alien to them. And while “Luciferian Towers” may still be likewise for some in attendance, it’s an unknown that is, on this sort of evidence, very much worth the getting to know.

There are missteps, though: a chthonic finale to Fam/Famine – on-edge though it may undoubtedly be, replete with imagery of two aeroplanes plummeting interminably in tandem – somewhat takes the edge off an otherwise faith-restoratively captivating return to the capital. Likewise, while the “America is a Third World country” soundbite concerning “a hopeless situation” – from the closing BBF3 – may seem incisive, set against riot footage and the sanguinary throb of fuzzy police cars, instead, the song grates, seeming misplaced in every sense of the word. A throwback to how they became, rather than what they’ve become maybe, but having been incensed by the incendiary actions and reactions of ‘the expert fuckers who broke this world’, and upping the ante accordingly, those more hopeful drones aforementioned must surely – if unexpectedly – represent their future…