Track Listing

1. Dead Flag Blues: Dead Flag Blues/Slow Moving Trains/Cowboy.../Outro
2. East Hastings: Nothing's Alrite In Our Life/Deadflagblues/Sad Mafioso/Drugs In Tokyo/Bl
3. Providence: Divorce And Fever/Dead Metheny/Kicking Horse OnBrokenhill/String Loop Manufacture

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7253 in Music
• Released on: 1998-06-15
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
It's hard to imagine this disc coming out of Montreal or, really, any urban habitat. The post-rock instrumentals on f#a#(infinity symbol), distantly related to the sounds made by the Australian band Dirty Three, serve as walking music for a loner hoping to hitch a ride in the middle of the Arizona desert and dealing with the inevitability of another night in coyote territory. Godspeed's swelling array of guitars, bagpipes, cellos, violins, trumpets, and drums is riveted together with an understated hope that is emotionally clutching, often devastating. This core of heavy Midwestern stoicism, saturated with waves of strings, hardcore interludes, and ripples of Morricone guitar, leaves listeners with the understanding that there is no escape from the badlands that surround and permeate us. --Michael Woodring

Customer Reviews

Post-apocalypse soundtracks
You scarcely notice that the album has started: there's just a growing drone, then a male voice begins to speak: "The car's on fire - and there's no driver at the wheel." Gradually, sentence by sentence, he describes the collapse of urban civilisation. You look at your watch and realise that the standard length of a pop single has already passed and this is still just beginning ...
It's not party music, then; in fact, it's light years away from what's generally accepted as popular music at all. The three tracks clock in at 20 minutes or so each. Each is not a "song" as popular music has understood it, but a suite of several different sections. The instrumentation is surprisingly traditional, guitars and strings (even bagpipes) but deployed to form a drone-heavy sonic landscape more associated with electronic distortion. Voices are rare, generally spoken word sections and/or cut-ups like the one cited above; drums, likewise, occur once in a blue moon. There are long, slow, muted sections, there are occasional loud, fast sections, and once in a while there's a delicate little tune lost in the distance; all of it tied together by an overarching atmosphere of loss and regret.
I liked it: I'm always prepared to salute people wanting to do something different and break out of the straitjacket of the "pop song". If someone wants to stretch out and take 20 minutes, do away with a thudding beat to hammer home the obvious rhythm, experiment with textures rather than banal words, that's fine by me, and this gets 4 stars accordingly. I can't deny, however, that some of the more negative points made by earlier reviewers have validity. There is, for instance, no real logic that designates these four bits of music as part of one composition and those three bits as part of another: you could have placed the track divisions in totally different places, or indeed have presented this as an 11-track album, without changing a note. There's also, undoubtedly, an element of sameness about it: slow-and-quiet / slow-and-loud just about covers a lot of the album. All of which is to say that although this certainly seeks to stretch our concept of popular music, you are not going to find an hour's worth of "composed" music with an overarching logic in which one part builds on another and there's a sense of necessary consequences being explored: this is not Beethoven, there isn't that level of attention to the import of each individual note, and it doesn't repay that sort of listening. It does make an extremely good soundtrack, however, in the right mood, be that indoors or out: I have particularly strong memories of listening to it sitting in the car in an empty multistorey car park in Croydon, on one of the grey mornings between Christmas and New Year. (Come to think of it, that image might well sum up the mood of the album better than anything I've said above!) So, could actually be 3 stars for there being, maybe, less to this than there seems at first, but I'll give it 4 for being prepared to do something different. I hope, however, that I've described it in such a way as to make it clear that this is the sort of thing that divides people and anything from 5 to 1 (or less) is entirely believable, according to personal taste. I like it; I hope you will; but I won't hold it against you if you hate it. Give it a go, anyway.

Sounds nice in places....
There is just too much silence here for my liking. I'm a fan of the actual music that Godspeed create but theres just not enough here to keep my attention. It seems that most of the album is made up of ambient noise or just silence. The first and second tracks left me feeling tired and bored, i was looking for tracks with long build ups, reaching epic conclusions, fooling, surprising and inspiring me. Well i got one, part 3 was a pretty great listen, all 29 minutes of it, nice variety of instruments, driving drums, careful use of strings, real ebb and flow, very nice. I can't recommend a CD with one nice track, even if it is 29 minutes long minus yet more silence. Havn't heard any other Godspeed stuff so i can't compare, but this album is definately wanting in both material and variety departments.

I bought this on a whim... and it's amazing
I literally just bought this out of curiosity because I'd heard the odd good thing about it here and there. As soon as Dead Flag Blues kicked in I was blown away. It begins by setting the scene with a stark monologue, before the violins glide in.

Inside about the first 2 minutes you know you're in for something special. I would say this is a concept album, it seems to be anyway, on the theme of modern living in an industrial society. It conveys so many emotions over the hour, but overall it is uplifting and hopeful.

It's a very hard album to describe because it's basically an hour of ambient/chillout music with some voice samples and sound effects to carry the "story" along.

I think someone said, think Pink Floyd without the vocals, regarding this album; and they'd be right. One of the best progressive albums I've heard in some time. I'm pretty eager to get some more stuff by this band now.

Peace,
Dom x