A Year of Blind Spots: Lift Yr Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Lift Yr Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

2000

This isn't like other albums. I can feel you roll your eyes from here. I get it. I was like you once. I can't say I've "changed," but I'm definitely more open to more kinds of music than I was when I was sixteen.

When I was sixteen, or thereabouts, I had access to this album. Probably a Santa Claus gift. I had the jolly fat man buy me six or seven albums every year. They weren't all success stories. I wasn't careful in what I asked for. No lists compiled with care. Just random recommendations passed off from kind, well-meaning strangers on the internet. Someone anonymous and long forgotten told me, indirectly, that this was a good album.

I didn't have the patience for it. You know how that goes too. We're young and we want everything all at once. No time for 22-minute suites. Certainly no time for four 22-minute suites, goddamn. Insane post-rock alien shit. Who knows what I actually got stuck on that Christmas. Maybe The Clash or something. I don't mention any examples for comparison. The Clash is fucking incredible. It's just incredible in a different way than this. In a more accessible way. 

But eventually, two decades go by and you feel your bones creak and you find that you're still searching, still on the hunt for good music, after all this time. And the need is even greater, and the feeling when it hits is even bigger. I hear the monstrosity that is Lift Yr Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven, and I feel like I am standing in the shadow of greatness, like I found something, finally, that fits the description of what I'm looking for.

I didn't need this description but it helped me along my journey all the same: "orchestral crust punk." I think I could have gotten by without it, and was on my way to doing so, what with this basically being a finer-tuned, grander version of what Explosions in the Sky were doing on Friday Night Lights. But the exposition to the left-leaning politics of Godspeed You! Black Emperor really did it for me, in terms of loving this album. You can't really get it from the music, but you can get it from the way the music is constructed: the focus on the art and not the people making the art; the way the music uplifts and points toward the spirit of cohesiveness; the title of their most recent album. This is outsider music that is so fucking towering that it can't help but pull even the insiders toward the outside.

I remember certain segments of this album—some of the rising and falling, definitely that old dude talking about sleeping on the beach—as if on a radio signal from many miles and many years away. But the music remains very much staked to the present. I don't need nostalgia to bolster this art. Perhaps I never did.

The only issue is... well, it's the same issue that made me give up on this thing back in the day, it's just that the issue is more manageable these days. I just can't find the proper space to indulge in this album for than a couple times per week. Riding the El seemed to be the best time to do it. It's not really an album you can listen to pieces of, ya feel me? It's 88 minutes long and it deserves to be experienced for 88 minutes straight. Which is rarely possible, not now. But that's just me expressing a lack of patience again. What, am I sixteen years old?

I don't have time to get lost. Too much to see, too much to do, too many places to be. On occasion, though, when I want to feel something that I've never felt before, I can put on this album. Maybe you can too.