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GY!BE is a band that I desperately want to hate. They're pretentious, and their whole gimmick is riffing off of the same situationist-y/dada vibe that has been done over and over for basically the entire 20th century. They are the Thomas Pynchon of music. It's also worth mentioning that their frontman is exactly what you would imagine a frontman of a band like GY!BE to be like. Yep, he's a sneering hippy douche, the kind of self-satisfied slimeball who would have been a Maoist at Harvard in the 60s before selling out and becoming a yuppie lawyer. The dad from SLC punk minus twenty-five years, maybe? But I digress. But the thing is, I can't bring myself to dislike them. I also will freely admit that my scathing appraisal of their lead-guy is based primarily off of a Google Image Search and libel that I made up just now. But come on, you know I'm probably right. Can you really see Montreal loft-dwelling white-kid artists not being like that?
I am like half a zillion other uber-referential overly-read dweebs that mask some sort of nerd self-hate and/or swaggering undeserved academic snootiness by feeling an initial wave of revulsion at “pretentious and/or art-faggy things”. Let me be clear and honest right now: I only hate loft-dwelling art fags because I am very, very jealous of them. I don't want to work 12 hours a day in the sun and be poor,exhausted and yelled-at all day. I don't want to have to go to Afghanistan and live in a tent for a year. I want to live in a metropolitan loft in Paris or New York(or Montreal?) and drink coffee and blather on about post-this and that and hand-roll my own cigarettes and have sex with attractive university students with low-self esteem who lack the life experience to know that guys like me are assholes. I want to play in an apocalyptic post-rock band based out of my Montreal loft. I don't want to work for a living. I am serious as an abortion right now.
Now that my extended hipster caveat is out of the way, onto the album! If I was being exiled to Siberia tomorrow and could only bring five albums with me, this would be one of them. The Beach Boys are to California what F#A#Infinity is to empty Vancouver train yards after the bombs have wiped the slate clean. If you've ever found yourself lying on your back thinking about how awesome it would be if we all nuked ourselves to extinction, and you then became frustrated by lack of soundtrack...Well, you're troubles are over! This album does this perfectly, and I need that particular soundtrack quite often. This album is a perfectly composed drifting audio journey through a horrible alienating post-industrial world, full of desperate people, empty train-yards, used needles, rusting cars...well, basically the real world for a lot of us. I think it's interesting that all the critics immediately jump to the “future apocalypse” thing, when it's really pretty plausible that this is about the real, current world. Anyone who's done any sort of stint as a lumpenproletariat can tell you that the world doesn't sound like bubblegum, it sounds like this. The ranting homeless man, the cars whizzing along dark streets, the trains...this album could be as much a soundtrack for homeless in Detroit as it is for some fantastical “post-apocalyptic” masturbatory fantasy. I really wish there was a good synonym for post-apocalyptic, the phrase is starting to annoy me.
This album does a very certain thing and does it very,very well. If the idea of listening to dark artsy tape-loops appeals to you, you will love the hell out of this album. They do what they do better than anyone else in the business. Also, it's very worth getting the vinyl. This is a great album for vinyl nerds,and the packaging is full of sweet little gimmicks like a penny flattened by a train. I like this album on vinyl because it definitely is not intended to be listened to “track by track”. At this point, I am required by law to tell you that the first note on the album is F#, the first note on the B-side is A# and it ends with a never-ending loop.
There is a reason this album populates best album lists of critics all over. I'll spare you the witticisms and get to the point: This album fucking rules. Download it now and then go buy the vinyl from your local record shop.
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