It’s early days still, so I haven’t yet been able to decide whether
Luciferian Towers is Godspeed being
hopeful this one time, or if it’s just them laughing — with disgust — at the
world falling apart. Either way, the music is invigorating — I feel renewed, almost optimistic, when I take off the earphones,
like the smell of fresh laundry. It’s that ephemeral moment of magic that
happens when silence collides with absolute noise.
The record is a “spiritual moment”, perhaps (even though I don’t technically believe in the concept). Last night, I had one of those, at some point during ‘Anthem
For No State’. I was briefly transported — the visual is hazy now, but it was
some desolate mountain, with power lines all around. I’ve added train tracks
into the memory now, but I can’t say for sure if they existed at the time. This
lasted for literally a second or two, but it’d been building up.
--
I’ve never been someone who tears up while listening to music, a
fact I state with neither pride nor shame. Music affects me in countless ways;
blubbering just isn’t one of them. I think it’s happened no more than twice in
my life. But during ‘Anthem For No State’, in the second part I think, I found
myself heavy-eyed.
The welling up wasn’t out of sadness or some profound despair that
Godspeed captured in that particular playthrough; it was an involuntary
physical reaction to the song. And as soon as I became aware of it, the tear
ducts shut down immediately. But it happened.
I often go back to this line by Mark Richardson in his piece about
Godspeed a few years ago: “…it's the kind of
sound you hear with your body and not just your ears.” I’ve read it many
times since, but never before, and it — at the time — basically put into words
an emotion I’d long had about Godspeed (and a bunch of other music too).
This is what Godspeed do. There’s of
course the dystopia, the mystery, the cheek, the audacity, the defiance. The transcendental
orchestrations that paint with sound a picture of the world we live in. The risks
they take. Their last two record, especially — both of which came after a
nine-year period of silence, before “god’s pee decided to roll again” — had a
speculative emotional dissonance to them. Remarkable as they were, and exhilarating
in their own right, I was far more comfortable admiring those two releases from
a distance — they were aspirational, intimidating. They made me seek them out.
But Godspeed, beyond all those elements, has also been a deeply personal band. Their music —especially when
I first discovered it as a kid through their John Peel session — doesn’t so
much speak to me as it becomes a part of
me. Luciferian Towers has that
elusive quality of changing something about me (taking into account that it’s only
been a day).
--
(Just to clarify, people often talk of music that ‘changes’ them,
as do I. This isn’t some grand spectacle, really. It’s not like you wake up one
day and start parting your hair on the other side and you start speaking fluent
German and all aspects of your personality are suddenly inverted. Instead, it’s
a subtle, barely-there shift, where the music affects a specific part inside
you, destroying it over repeat plays, and birthing a new thing in its place.
The outside world can rarely ever tell, but you just know.)
Of course, I’m leaving open the possibility that I didn’t, in fact,
experience any wanky “moment of clarity” situation at all. That maybe I just
nodded off while listening to the album — maybe that’s what meditation is: a
series of almost-asleep, almost-awake rotations.
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