“NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD,” released Oct. 4, is the eighth studio album by legendary post-rock band “Godspeed You! Black Emperor.” GY!BE is a band that has established post-rock as a genre. They have plenty of classic albums under their belt, including “Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven” and “F♯ A♯ ∞.”
While many bands have come and gone with the commercial peak of post-rock in the 2000s, GY!BE stands in a league of its own artistically.
GY!BE prides itself on its radical politics, dystopian vibes, droning noises and its massive focus on instrumentation. GY!BE is a project that uses predominantly instrumentals, with very little, if any, lyrics or vocals present.
Even with the lack of lyrics, GY!BE has always done an excellent job at making the audience completely aware of the topics and themes discussed in their music, and it is no different here.
“NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” is a direct reference to what the Gaza Ministry’s death toll numbers were in Palestine as of Feb. 13. This album is a direct confrontation with the horrors and the continued genocide that have been happening in Palestine since Oct. 7, when Hamas fired a huge barrage of rockets into southern Israel, an attack that left 1,139 people dead and resulted in 251 hostages being taken.
According to the latest data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the World Health Organization and the Palestinian government, the latest casualty figures as of 12:30 p.m. in Gaza (09:30 GMT) on October 20 are:
- Killed: at least 42,600 people, including nearly 16,765 children
- Injured: more than 99,795 people
- Missing: more than 10,000
Massive amounts of damage to infrastructure and land have occurred. Israeli attacks have damaged:
- More than half of Gaza’s homes (damaged or destroyed)
- 80% of commercial facilities
- 87% of school buildings
- Healthcare facilities: 17 out of 36 hospitals are partially functional
- 68% of road networks
- 68% of farmland
No matter how much we hear about the atrocities being committed in Palestine (and now Lebanon), the true scale and extremity will always be incomprehensible to us in the West. We will hear death tolls, news headlines and maybe even direct accounts of this genocide, but the level of tragedy is something that we can never truly understand or experience.
So, what can a band like GY!BE really offer in times like this?
After listening to this album, that answer is hope.
The opening song, “SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS,” is a very bright, folksy introduction to the album with playful percussion and distorted guitar chords repeating over and over again. It’s meant to be the calm before the storm, as the middle section of this album is an intense whirlwind of instrumentals filled with power and emotion.
“BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD” follows afterward, a 13-and-a-half minute song filled with uneasy bass drones, deafening guitar wails and whimpering strings. It’s the song that is most reminiscent of other GY!BE albums, which is fitting for this album because GY!BE is a band that was born out of a world that was experiencing great political and social upheaval.
The next song, “RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD,” is another behemoth of a track, spanning 13 minutes and featuring the only lyrics on the album.
In the middle of the album’s stunning centerpiece is a haunting poem in Spanish spoken by Michele Fiedler Fuentes. The poem translates to:
“Raindrops cast in lead / our illuminated side / and then extinguished and buried and finished / under the perfect sun / under the body falling from the sky / they were martyrs who fell / because on our side they were martyrs since before we were even born / those who tried and were killed for trying / those who died young, angry or old, and never saw the dawn / innocents and children and the tiny bodies that laughed and will remain asleep forever / and never saw the beauty of the dawn.”
“BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL” is the shortest song on the album, topping out at three and a half minutes, but it feels just as important and as massive as the songs before it.
It starts off with this ominous drone and slowly builds with whimpering guitars and creaking bass. While the song serves as a transitional song, it is crafted masterfully.
“PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS” is the most thunderous song on the album, with droning bass, wailing strings and metallic clangs that sound like warning bells going off. It’s an incredible 11-minute song that leads into the final song on the album.
The final track, the single “GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS,” ends the album perfectly. The first half of the song is this very tragic combination of rock and classical music, with a fight between the guitars and violin. This represents the first half of the title, which is intended to represent the rubble of buildings that were destroyed by the bombing.
The second half of the song, in contrast, has moments of shimmering guitars and calming strings, representing the green shoots, the plant life, that grow after the bombing has ended.
“NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” is an album with practically no lyrics, yet it says a lot more than many bands do with an entire discography.
In the truest sense, this is a must-listen record, not because it has constructed of brilliantly catchy hooks, acrobatic vocal performances or flashy technical proficiency, but because the message it carries is one of vital importance:
The genocide of the Palestinian people must come to an end, and we must maintain hope that it will.
