Together with Radiohead's Kid A, Lift Your Skinny Fists set the blueprint for arty, ambitious music in the new millennium. Both these albums offered insistently minimal music with an atmosphere of vague insinuation. Critics wrote a lot about how the minimalism was in fact a radical commentary on modern life, and the insinuations were actually fractured political statements, whose very inarticulateness reflected the difficulty of self-expression in the modern world. Godspeed were supposed to be radical. They never sang any lyrics, and they gave few interviews, but this drew yet more attention to oblique slogan-like statements like this one in the liner notes of Lift Your Skinny Fists: "We dedicate this stanza to quiet refusals, loud refusals, and sad refusals. We dedicate it to every prisoner in the world." Don't take my word for it: one contemporary review called this album "a blistering (albeit politically imprecise) homily on the new world order."

The "politically imprecise" part of that phrase contradicts the rest of it. Reflecting on this album now, it seems that Godspeed's style is actually safe and cautious, in that it carefully avoids any specific message that might ever ruffle any feathers or inspire any kind of action. If your album is dedicated to every prisoner in the world, it is, in fact, dedicated to no one. Prisoners are in prison for a wide variety of reasons. Furthermore, if someone were thrown in prison unjustly, it would be more helpful to them if their plight were given a clear name, thus giving them a real voice and hope of release.

But let's talk about the music. Nine musicians played on Lift Your Skinny Fists, which suggests numerous contributions and points of view coming together. Yet, the album is surprisingly sparse musically. There are four movements, spread over ninety minutes, and each has one or two simple, repetitive peaks, stretched out to 5-7 minutes each, with long valleys of ambience in between. Take the second half of "Static," a long build-up to crescendo, undoubtedly meant to be an emotional focus of the album. It starts out all right, a slow eight-note acoustic rhythm, just complex enough to hold attention. It is strummed with a measured pace, deliberately slowly, suggesting some impending release. The release comes, but it is quite anti-climactic. The same rhythm is picked up by an electric guitar and played louder, then faster, with some drums. The tempo is higher, but there hasn't been any actual development -- the dramatic effect comes from the very simple device of increasing volume and speed. I don't expect virtuosity from modern music, but it is more interesting when multiple musicians play different rhythms and melodies, which then somehow combine and interact. But if the whole orchestra is laboriously grinding out the same thing, that feels like a wasted opportunity.

Despite Godspeed's reputation, this album does not do crescendos well. The production is surprisingly weak and reedy, even compared to the band's own first album. In the monumental peak of "East Hastings," the guitar sounds strong, recalling the dark ferocity of Joy Division on "Shadowplay" or "New Dawn Fades." In "Static," though, it sounds thin and high-pitched, and it doesn't help that the guitar line itself is simpler and plainer. With more texture, that feedback at the end of "Static" might have been more impressive -- Agalloch's "The Grain" takes a very similar approach, but with layers of crackling, smouldering crust and fuzz atop the dark drone, thus painting a much more compelling apocalyptic soundscape.

The build-up is often better than the climax. "Storm" begins with a theme for a procession, gentle and almost playful. Between this piece and the next one, there's an opportunity to relax a little and dwell on a meandering, trance-like melody on violin and other instruments. But it's not called "Storm" for nothing, it has to get louder with more distortion. The only release for this building tension is a long, loud, flat, monotonous drone for almost five minutes. Even here, you can see some effort to ramp up the drama. They add in galloping drums which awkwardly slow down and fall apart in the protracted ending. But the musical lead at the core is inescapably boring. The album doesn't have the chops to sustain the pretension.

There's genuinely good music here, too. If the album could be pared down to 40 minutes, it would be very different. The ending of "Storm" is arresting: lonely clean keys flicker up from a droning, feedback-laden morass. The last part of "Sleep" recaptures the light touch from the beginning, with a welcome optimistic tone. The final movement is more fragmented, but has a few inspired moments such as the glockenspiel duet.

In fact, if you were to listen to this album from a randomly chosen starting point, it might sound pretty good, or at least promising. But unfortunately, it's ninety minutes long. The parts that are supposed to bring everything into sharp focus are instead tedious, and a lot of the stuff in between is forgettable. Yes, at different times, you can hear a violin, a French horn, tape loops and musique concrete. But it's hard to remember what exactly they all do, and why they were necessary, and when I try to recall details from the individual movements, the good parts get lost in the tedium.

Maybe I just don't get it, but I tried, and I'm pre-disposed to like dark and foreboding music (e.g. Agalloch, Aphex Twin, Nine Inch Nails, or Godspeed's debut). To me, Lift Your Skinny Fists defines and predicts the mistakes of the 2000s. We saw some great albums during that decade, but the general trend was toward extreme minimalism, as if the actual music were but a prelude, a token to be checked off before one got to the really good part, which was the interviews and the lengthy critical interpretations in music blogs.

I first heard of god speed you black emperor when the second disc of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven was used for a modern dance piece in Seattle at a show called Blue Moves. I love the entire album and feel like it is dance movement captured in music.

This is by far GY!BE's most popular and influential album. It culminates the style pioneered in their earlier works, with the distinctive use of recordings of street people, preachers, folk songs, and other detritus, mixed into eclectic, extended "songs" without conventional vocals, lyrics, verses, or choruses. GY!BE's music fits loosely into the category of progressive rock, but a key influence is the minimalism of Steve Reich.

This is a 2-disc album with about 45 minutes of music on each disc, just barely too long to fit on one. Each disc is divided into two tracks, but this is misleading since all four tracks are internally diverse suites, adding up to one 90-minute extended suite.

As many have noted, it is intensely emotional music. What meaning it may contain is not at all clear. It is widely known that the GY!BE collective is left-leaning, some sort of anarchists, but there are no overt political statements to be found here, just ominous suggestive phrases in the "song" titles such as "Cancertowers on Holy Road Hi-Way," "World Police and Friendly Fire," and "Deathkamp Drone."

I have never been totally convinced by this eclectic early GY!BE. In my view their masterpiece is the last album they recorded before they went on indefinite hiatus in 2003, YANQUI U.X.O. (see my review), which is entirely instrumental with no field recordings.

LIFT YR. SKINNY FISTS stands, though, as the album that most clearly represents the quintessence of the band in terms of its public reception, and in that sense it is indispensable. Perhaps the best way to think of it, as with most instrumental rock/post-rock, is as cinematic music for a film in your mind.

The band toured in 2011 for the first time since 2003, and word is they're working on a new album. I look forward to hearing it!

I love this album. If I had bigger, better speakers I might well be ticketed by the bylaw officer in my town. What a wonderful band. Brave, bold, daring, unstoppable, relentless, music to knock down national boundaries. "Lift yer skinny fists ---" indeed. 100% recommendation. Buy it, turn up the volume. Oh --- and I mistakenly awarded it three stars when I first submitted this rewiew --- no no, this a a FIVE-star thunderstorm, ready to rock your house.

This came much earlier than I expected, the sound quality is phenomenal, and overall I am extremely satisfied with my purchase!

Did not imagine I would ever like this kind of music. I was lead to this band through the following sequence of events: I liked Radiohead, then decided to borrow a disc from a friend that had some mixed tracks. One of them I couldn't place into a "style" (as meaningless as that can be), so I asked him about it. He said some stuff that included the term "post-rock". So, using Amazon as my nexus for all things musical, I hunted down "Post-Rock" as my search term and saw what it would feed me. After reading reviews, I liked the impression I got. Bought the album used, and have been listening to it for weeks. Cannot get enough.

Awesome, compelling, interesting album. Worth a listen for anyone who has never heard of this group before.

I have discovered Godspeed and post-rock a decade too late because during the time it was burgeoning I was in graduate school and not paying as much attention to music as I should have been. I picked up "F#A#(Infinity)" f#a# (infinity symbol)from my local library and was absolutely BLOWN away. I have since purchased everything of GYBE I can find. I love them all. This is a great CD if you need more, but as a first GYBE album, I would start with "F#A#(Infinity)" because it is near-perfect. I am now searching for other bands that are similar in quality to these guys (and girls)...if anyone has any suggestions!??? I got a list of post-rock bands off of Wikipedia, but there are sooooo many it is difficult to begin. And the ones I started looking at via You Tube or My Space did not seem to have any resemblance at all to GYBE.

The music is symphonic, although only a few members of the orchestra showed up today... The theme is solemn perhaps even tragic but so is our present state of earthly affairs, so we find ourselves quite comfortably on this ground. The lyrics come to us straight from the soldiers of their battle fronts. Their voices might not be the purest but... their thoughts and feelings seem to be. The overall atmosphere this music spreads upon us, although quite somber, brings us comfort of levels with nowhere to fall from. We are walking the walk with Godspeed You Black Emperor and more we do more we want to stay there in this... strange place. It seems hard to believe the place did not exist before this great Canadian band created it.

In the 1990s, there was a infinitely stupid genre label called post rock. Cul-De-Sac, Bark Psychcosis and a lot of other bands got thrown in this bag. All the music really was was a bunch of very smart artists who knew their Can and Faust and Cluster and did not give a rats tape loop about making it in the market place.

That did not mean that great music was not made. If anything, modern digital production gave these bands tools their musical father's only dreamed of. Godspeed You Black Emperor is one of the bands that capitalized on this.

Godspeed's music really has little to do with rock as we know it. On this album, there is no overt beat. The band starts long pieces quietly, slowly, and builts them into shimmering climaxes. This takes some time, but eventually, the volume gets quite powerful, and wait long enough, the music sneaks up to provide an indredibly emotional experiance.

If anything, this music comes out of Stockhausan, Terry Riely and Steve Riech. It is not that Godspeed uses loops for hipnotic effect. The music builds through playing. But listening to the sustained passages. that almost freeze in time around a tonal center, and you hear the sublte shifts in volume and texture. Turn this music on and you may grow distacted, but once the goose starts cooking, you are suddenly enveloped.

Worth your time and attention.

Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven being GYBE's second studio album and 2000 release reminds me of many experimental bans that I have heard before,i.e., Laibach, Yes, Kraftwerk, Einsturzende Neubauten, Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead. The use of samples also reminds me of Skinny Puppy. The booklet is very strange. With basically no information inside and a strange letter written by the band. Allmusic (4/5) and Pitchfork Media (9/10) both gave it high marks and I agree with this assessment. The album is not easy listening and is very challenging but also extremely rewarding and definitely cutting edge without sounding pretentious. 4/5.