Do Make Say Think - Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord is Dead
(Constellation)
In a few years, we may look back at 1999/2000 and see Godspeed You
Black Emperor! as just as important a band in the grand, myopic scheme of
things as Slint. If and when we do that, we may very well see Do Make Say Think
as the Rodan to Godspeed's Slint. While trailing Godspeed in grandiosity,
both in songwriting style and the number of guys they send to the stage, with
Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord is Dead, Do Make Say Think has shown
that they can match or surpass their provincial neighbors in propensity and
ability both to write compelling rock guitar parts and to write
long, odd album titles, just as Rodan was to Slint (well, at least in the
former listed ability).
After Do Make Say Think's 1st album such a statement would be reaching.
Not that it wasn't a great album, it was just in a whole different arena
than Godspeed. With its heavy use of dual drummers, keyboard effects, and
six-string bass, it was definitely more standard post rock fare. Any
comparisons to Godspeed would have been based entirely on nationality and
ability and not at all on sound. With their 2nd album, DMST has grown.
There is nothing "standard post rock fare" about them anymore. Gone are the
persistent funk underpinnings; in their place are washes of trumpet and
saxophone and a sound more organic, relaxed, and textured.
The two best songs on Goodbye Enemy Airship... both follow the same pattern:
do something sparse, slow, and quiet for a few minutes, then transition into
something much louder, faster, and more dense. "When Day Chokes the Night"
starts off with a slow, repetitive guitar drone that is backed by nothing other
than soft noise. Some of the noise is supplied by other band members but most
seems to just be artifacts from the recording room, an old barn outside of
Toronto where the entire album was recorded. After a rolling drum segway, the
saxophone dominates the densely-packed sound of the second half of the song.
Throughout the song "The Landlord is Dead," a short interplay of guitar & bass
is repeated at varying volumes and intensities. A mellow sax part sways around
the guitars in the first section of the song, while a quickly strummed, searing
second guitar part pierces through them in the second section.
"Minmin" is a bit more playful than those two songs, the guitar and bass
sounding bouncey and almost pop, similar to Ganger's less-My Bloody Valentine
inspired moments, accompanied by a pitch-shifting spacey keyboard tone.
DMST shows its own MBV influence with its wall of sound use of effect-laden
guitar on the almost 13 minute soundscape "Goodbye Enemy Airship"
that closes the album.
A joke I like to make when talking to people who really love Mogwai is to say,
"Godspeed You Black Emperor! is like what Mogwai would sound like if Mogwai
was a good band." Godspeed's emergence, for me at least, seems to have
lived up to the promise made by Mogwai, before Mogwai started endorsing clothes,
or even released their first full length, the promise to take whatever post
rock was and turn it into something new and invigorating.
Like those Quebecois, the style of music DMST has created defies
classification. Post rock, rock, fusion, jazz,
drone, space rock, psych, punk, funk, it is simultaneously all of
those things while never really quite being any one of them.
Perhaps, then, it is time for a new joke. From the intro of the first song
to the outro of the last, DMST shows you can destroy those tired old clichés
and revitalize post rock while still using a backbone of electric guitar.
Perhaps, then, Goodbye Enemy Airship... is the great album Mogwai has never
been able to make.
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