Last year, we named Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s F# A# ∞ the greatest post-rock album of all time. Their next album, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven earned the number 6 spot. Obviously, the most important group in the genre crafted two of its greatest records. What’s more interesting and less obvious is that they contrast each other—F# A# ∞ documents the end of the world and Lift Your Skinny Fists revels in a post-capitalist world. The former is foreboding, the latter is elated. The former brandishes prolonged and varied track structures, even implementing minutes of silence. The latter adheres to a formula that the genre as a whole would adopt as its template. Yet, controversially, neither is Godspeed’s best release.
Sandwiched between those two mammoth releases is Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada, the group’s strongest and—at 26 years old—most relevant work because it bridges the gap between F# A# ∞ and Lift Your Skinny Fists, and, more importantly, provides a conduit for enduring political nihilism.
Slow Riot is rustic. It begins as if a projector is winding up, sepia-toned and malaise-ridden, pulling itself up from a deluge by burning ketones. Once it gets moving, it’s fatigued, not in a bored sense, but in an intentional display of weariness; Godspeed’s instruments must be bristled to life. In tangible terms, the glockenspiel moves in tandem with the cello, violin, and guitars to accentuate them, as if they are all dependent on each other. Thus, Slow Riot is tighter, and more condensed than its predecessor and successor. There’s a case to be made that these qualities prevent it from ascending as high as the group’s other albums from that period, but in reality, it orbits around a single gravitational point, trading off Godspeed’s more miraculous composition to hone in on its subject—Blaise Bailey Finnegan III.
Finnegan is easily Godspeed’s most developed character. While the group has a natural aptitude for embellishing spoken-word samples to the point that they are never just samples but often the only human voices in otherwise expressionist vistas, Finnegan receives more real estate than any of their subjects. He’s an open-mic poet who cussed out a court judge for paying a speeding ticket, plagiarized Iron Maiden lyrics, owns multiple firearms, has no qualms about physical violence against those who run their mouths on him, and believes America is a third-world country.
“BBF3” is dedicated to Finnegan’s ramblings between guns and government conspiracies, but Godspeed grant him gravitas. He comes off less like a randomly generated Grand Theft Auto NPC and more as an esteemed thinker whose suspicions are fleshed out because Godspeed prop him up with one of their best musical performances. They grant him a spell-binding saga of warm tones and a sonorous crescendo. The poem he recites on the song, which is ripped directly from Iron Maiden’s “Virus”, is treated like a decimation of the American government. When he lashes out at a judge over a $25 speeding ticket (isn’t inflation fun?!), it’s seen as praxis rather than an airing of grievances on a public servant. His entire shtick is quotable and charming, partially because of his manner of speaking, but mostly because Godspeed gave him a swelling emotional backdrop.
There is, of course, one segment that revamps Slow Riot from a late-’90s relic to an evergreen document.
Interviewer: Do you think things are gonna get better before they get worse?
Blaise Bailey Finnegan III: No way. Things are just gonna get worse and keep on getting worse. Like I said, America’s a third-world country as it is and we’re just basically in a hopeless situation as it stands.
Interviewer: What do you think this country’s gonna look like in the year 2003?
Blaise Bailey Finnegan III: Y’know, I’ll tell you the truth—nothing against you guys, but I don’t wanna answer that question because I haven’t even got a mind that’s that inhumane.
Interviewer: Are you ready for what’s coming?
Blaise Bailey Finnegan III: Ready as I’ll ever be. Most people aren’t.
Finnegan speaks vaguely and broadly but never incorrectly. He promotes self-preservation, involving oneself with those in your physical vicinity, and interacting with the world and walls and streets and shops you can walk or drive to, rather than mining for solace in the degrading state of technology where it’s all bullshit and even TVs suck. He speaks for those embarrassed by the House Democrats protesting by making art-class signs for State of the Union addresses.
Crucially, Finnegan is not a thought leader, political activist, or a hero. By all accounts, he’s just a guy. Likely, his name is Rick, as this Instagram post describes him. Other accounts of his backstory, seemingly from the mouth of Godspeed’s David Bryant but told through Reddit comments, so approach with a grain of salt, state that Rick crossed paths with the band in 1997 in Providence. Hours before performing, the art space that hosted the group held an open mic. Rick hopped on stage, recited a poem, then descended. He then approached the band members, rambling, and the group recorded their conversation with him.
There’s a working class beauty to this story. A mundane joy of someone spawning into a scene, spewing nonsense, and that nonsense resonating decades past its release. All respects to Rick, by the way. His Rhode Island accent churns his threats of violence and blatant lyric-ripping into slogans, and if not those, then manifestos—to protect our fellow people, because who else can we depend on? Rick’s words are representations of the human spirit, forever unrecognized by the government who dare not even bat an eye at their constituents.
Furthermore, Slow Riot benefits from being short and focused, traits none of Godspeed’s other works ever attempt to approach, because they runs counter to their nature. And despite its digestible stature, Slow Riot doesn’t concede any of the group’s core principles. “BBF3” has a coda after its climax that other groups would’ve axed after first rehearsals because they’d believe a 17-minute song doesn’t need more bloat. But to Godspeed, that’s another moment to exist within their realm. Why break the trance so soon?
It’s not oxymoronic to say that, despite this, Slow Riot is still more fixated on a single idea than any other Godspeed release. Their other records cover broad themes like hope or the apocalypse while here, Rick, and what he represents, are the core ideals. His seemingly random occurrence and existence. The fact that he appears on this track and exists as a folk legend, not because his words are innately wise, but because they have persisted. He speaks with the same pointed and scatter-brained language that Godspeed have long employed in their press releases and song titles. Often, with them, the cadence, diction, and punching power of a statement is not derived from its logic but its anarchism. It affronts the capitalist state by interacting on an artistic level rather than a dogmatic one. Rick, likewise, provides little evidence, but he doesn’t need to. He’s not speaking logically—he’s musing with the fervor that the way things are will only lead to our end. Severity is the medium of communication. Either you fight for your life or you suffocate under litigation you think will protect you. But that will not stop the oppressors.
There’s some irony in Slow Riot becoming Godspeed’s most relevant album merely months after their last record, at least to those in North America. You can thank Trump for that. It can be difficult to return to Godspeed albums because of their size. There just isn’t enough time or space in the day to bathe in them. Slow Riot is the outlier, and fortunately so, because it’s also their most connected to the outside world. It’s half an hour of political umbrage on the citizen’s level. It’s their easiest album to be fired up about because there’s a face to the name and a mouthpiece for these pointed ideas. How can you trust anything that’s happening now? The American government is sneaky, lying, and deceitful. They rip the people off. Rick needn’t be more specific in his barbs. We’ve seen the face of what he’s speaking to. We are watching the beginnings of social decay.
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