This album has been submitted by a user and is not included in any edition of the book.
Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven[a] is the second studio album by Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, released as a double album on 9 October 2000 on vinyl by Constellation and on CD by Kranky. The album consists of four 20-minute songs divided into movements, usually consisting of instrumental crescendos, with occasional use of field recordings. Though the band's output is politically-motivated, the overall tone is more hopeful than their prior work. Recording was conducted in February 2000 in Chemical Sound Studios, Toronto, and was derived from the band's live performances and guitarist Efrim Menuck's experience in film-making studies. Packaging contains liner notes dedicating the album to prisoners, a diagram illustrating each of the movement's sound, and William Schaff's artwork from the zine Notes to a Friend; Silently Listening No. 2. The album has received critical acclaim, with many critics finding the composition to be beautiful and sprawling, though comparisons to the band's prior discography were mixed. It has been listed on multiple year-end and decade-end lists. Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven garnered critical acclaim. On Metacritic, it has a score of 84 based on 13 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Critics have regarded the album to be beautiful and sprawling. Alternative Press called it "a massive instrumental effort" that is "as skilled and musical as it is on-the-fly improvised and messy", and The Austin Chronicle calling it "cinematic" and "breathtaking in its grandiose beauty". Highlighting the album's uplifting nature and use of field recordings, The Village Voice called Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas the "best movie I've seen all year." Among more mixed reviews, Rolling Stone found the album one-note but commended its compositional ambition, and The Guardian noted occasional "passages of spellbinding beauty" but found the listening experience uneven.
Fantastic post rock album by the masters themself. No other act knows how to go from some subtle introvert spare notes in slow tempo to all-in disrupting noise and tension and go back again. Great soundscapes and sounds: "cinematic" and "breathtaking in its grandiose beauty".
Whoever put this album forward towards the list has amazing musical taste and is an incredible human being...... Four 20 minute instrumental tracks that build to a crescendo with some documentary dialogue passages - it's multiple guitars, bass, two drummers, violins and double bass, electronic noise and it's a wall of sound. I've seen them twice now and they are quite brilliant.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant record.
For me this album became a great example of how you sometimes just have to be in the exact right situation for any given piece of music to click. I didn’t appreciate this very much on my drive to work or while shopping at target but the end of sleep came on as I was driving down an empty street at night, leaving behind the last 3 years of my life and it really hit different. I love this list but it lives and dies by the randomized. Some days it misses but days like this it really transcends.
No words obviously
Greatly melodic. Loved every single second of it. Ideal to dream away on
I didn’t really expect another album from this group, but two users chose to put these guys forward. I was a bit perplexed by F# A# ∞, the first album I heard from them, but I was a bit mesmerized. This one felt similar. I suspect that with more exposure my appreciation of either of these would increase.
You know, this isn't something I (or probably anyone) would throw on for fun. But this was really interesting, creative stuff. Deeply nuanced, occasionally unsettling, frequently beautiful. Thanks for sharing it. Fave Songs: Storm, Sleep
My second Godspeed album (and the second one on this user-submitted list) and I think that they are a new favorite! Loved everything about the journey this too me on.
Now we're talking. This second album by the legendary Canadian post-rock act was in my own shortlist of LPs to submit for this users section. Godspeed You! Black Emperor's debut being already in the list, I chose another record, eventually. But I'm obviously *delighted* that another user submitted *Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven* (and this not long after I entered the users "club" myself). I'm gonna repeat the same thing I always repeat when it comes to post-rock in the original list: it's a pivotal music genre that has been done dirty in the 1001 Albums book. So it's time to set the karmic balance right here. Now about the album itself: from that elated crescendo repeating the same heartbreaking leitmotiv in the first five minutes opening "Storm", to the eerie soundscapes ending "Like Antennas To Heaven" on a devastatingly melancholic, post-apocalyptic note, this two-disc release is filled to the brim with epic highlights. But what's even more impressive about this record is its stunning ability to evoke so many images and sensations related to the state of our fallen, late capitalist hellworld. A soundtrack for the end of times indeed, often sad-sounding and ripe with anxiety, but never fully devoid of *hope* (a keyword that has run throughout the Canadian band's career). A friend of mine once imagine the perfect video for the first minutes of the album: a lone beach being gradually peopled by dishevelled yet hopeful visitors moving in slow motion towards the viewer. This image haunts me to this day. The four 20-minute tracks/programs in *Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven* obviously encourage that sort of daydreaming. In fact, rarely has purely instrumental music (if you take aside the collage of field recordings often displaying distant endearing voices, as if remembered through the haze of old memories experienced in the afterworld) been so *powerfully* evocative. This album pulls off the feat of being like a sort of "platonic ideal" of what a great post-rock album should be, but it also transcends the boundaries of the genre at times (hence maybe why GY!BE have never been at ease with that tag). The collage aesthetics -- less noticeable in further releases, as great as most of them were -- is pivotal here. That interview of an old man reminiscing about Coney Island, lamenting that people "don't sleep anymore on the beach" there, is now as iconic as the music which follows it. Add the breathtaking acceleration within "Static", or the obsessive drilling guitars concluding the main section of "Sleep", along with another dozen of spellbinding moments like that, and what you have is an album for the ages. 5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5 10/10 for more general purposes (5 + 5). Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ---- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 6 (including this one) Albums from the users list I *might* include in mine later on: 9 Albums from the users list I won't include in mine: 17
Very impressive. 4 stars.
Rating: 7/10 Best songs: Static, Sleep
Still feel that I'm not at the right time in my life to fully get Godspeed just yet – this LP is a tour-de-force in composition and instrumentation, with each gargantuan track encompassing a world and journey all its own. Just frustrated that I can't fully piece together what those journies are just yet, I want to like this band so bad but there's a certain sense of fullness missing that makes things feel a bit disconnected rather than encompassing.
I love this album. You need to be prepared that it is an experience album and allot 20+ minutes for each song performance.
The musical equivalent of found footage from the apocalypse.
I think this should be in the original list and I'm not really a fan of the genre.
It's not my favourite of theirs and a tad overrated, but I like it.
Static sounds exactly like getting plaque and tartar removed from your teeth. The rest is pretty good. 3
It's a good score, but I couldn't rate it on par with albums with lyrics and vocals. It has good aural harmony and could even be used to set the mood for a film or even an anime.
We'll it's got that overly long pretentious title thing which I generally consider a bad sign but I actually liked it a lot, up until the fourth act which went full arthouse wankery, and not the interesting kind.
1 hour and 27 minutes of post - rock There is a time and a place, make sure when you listen it is yours
Was there an entire group of peripherally-metal types that all finished together recently? This shit, Karnivool, Nightwish, an early Stooges album possibly? All dropped in the last few days, and all slightly off the mark if you just wanna fucking rock. This band has a fucking dumb name, and they were one of those bands that infected heavy metal message boards in the mid-2000s. Every second insecure, scene tourist, I'm-more-than-just-a-metalhead type pretended they were fantastic. These guys, Skinny Puppy, Aphex Twin, Mogwai, Boris, Sun O)))))) etc etc you get the idea. Just boring post-rock stuff that does the exact same post-rock stuff as Mono or whatever. An hour of droning on, sounding exactly as you'd expect, thrilling... someone, I guess? It's like their main purpose as musicians is to give self-conscious heavy metal nerds something non-metal to say they like. Does anyone outside the "I like all kinds of music!" metal crowd listen to it? Anyway: not now cunts, I'm listening to ARMOURED SAINT. 2/5.
As far as artistic music goes this is up there with some of the more talented, unique albums. This felt closer to a movie score than a typical album. The ups and downs through the songs built tension and made it much more dramatic than a regular album. Overall it’s one of a kind and I can see why it’s considered so great. For me it’s more of an instrumental arrangement that is impressive but not something I’d listen to much. 5.5/10
Post-rock. Instrumental lenta. Me ha aburrido. Un 2.
So it turns out post-rock is just prog by a different name, and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven wasn't as enjoyable for me as Mogwai's effort was yesterday. Purely instrumental music doesn't really do much for me, interspersing it with documentary footage audio (or what sounds like it) loses me, and the length of tracks made it hard for me to really identify with anything casually; I get that I'm meant to stop everything and experience the music but when I can listen to other stuff that doesn't demand that of me and like it all the same or more, then stuff like this won't resonate with me. 2/5, it's nice, it lacks the thunderbastard stylings of Mogwai and maybe it's unfortunate for GY!BE that they came up back-to-back but such is life.
Inspirational and random. I enjoyed the pastiche but I don’t know if I’ll crave it in the future. I know where to find it if I do.
Not for me, I found it quite boring.
As soon as I saw the album was for 80 minutes and had 4 tracks I knew it would be pretentious nonsense. And I was right.