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**Godspeed You! Black Emperor - G_d's Pee At State's End! ★★★★☆**

After a decade-long hiatus that left post-rock devotees wandering in the wilderness like lost souls clutching worn copies of "F♯ A♯ ∞," Montreal's apocalyptic orchestra Godspeed You! Black Emperor returned in 2010 with all the subtlety of a freight train carrying nuclear waste through a suburban playground. Their 2021 offering, "G_d's Pee At State's End!," finds the collective still very much in the business of soundtracking civilization's slow-motion collapse, though perhaps with slightly less fire and brimstone than their earth-scorching early work.

To understand where GY!BE stands today, one must first genuflect before their unholy trinity of masterworks. Their 1997 debut "F♯ A♯ ∞" emerged from the underground like some beautiful, terrible prophecy, with its field recordings of doomsday preachers and homeless philosophers providing the perfect prelude to 20 minutes of the most gorgeously devastating instrumental music ever committed to tape. "The Dead Flag Blues" remains their calling card – a patient build from whispered apocalyptic musings to a crescendo that could wake the dead and send them running for cover.

Then came 2000's "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven," their undisputed magnum opus that took everything brilliant about their debut and amplified it to cathedral-sized proportions. Across four movements spanning nearly 90 minutes, the nine-piece ensemble crafted what amounts to a post-rock "Dark Side of the Moon" – an album so perfectly sequenced and emotionally devastating that it redefined what instrumental music could achieve. "Storm" and "Sleep" bookend the album like twin monuments to human fragility, while the central pieces explore every shade of melancholy between hope and despair.

The trilogy concluded with 2002's "Yanqui U.X.O.," a more focused and politically charged affair that found the band at their most righteously angry. Trading some of their earlier sprawl for precision-guided fury, tracks like "09-15-00" hit with the force of controlled demolitions, while maintaining the group's gift for finding beauty in ruins.

Which brings us to "G_d's Pee At State's End!," an album that arrives in our current moment of cascading crises like a long-lost transmission from a parallel dimension where things are somehow even worse. The title alone – a characteristically profane middle finger to both religious and governmental authority – signals that two decades haven't mellowed this particular rage against various machines.

The album's four movements unfold with the band's signature patience, though there's a weathered quality to the proceedings that suggests hard-won wisdom alongside the familiar fury. Opening track "A Military Alphabet (five eyes, all blind) (4521.0kHz 6730.0kHz 4109.09kHz) / Job's Lament / First of the Last Glaciers / where we break how we shine (ROCKETS FOR MARY)" – because why use five words when fifty will do – builds from shortwave radio fragments into a towering wall of orchestrated noise that feels both nostalgic and freshly urgent.

The standout piece, "Fire at Static Valley," showcases the band at their most cinematically powerful, weaving together strings, horns, and guitars into something that sounds like the soundtrack to a revolution that's simultaneously beginning and ending. It's here that GY!BE's current incarnation feels most vital, proving that their particular brand of orchestrated chaos hasn't lost its ability to raise goosebumps and revolutionary spirits in equal measure.

"Government Came" closes the album with characteristic bleakness, though there's something almost comforting about the band's unwavering commitment to finding the sublime in the apocalyptic. In an era when actual apocalypse feels less like metaphor and more like Tuesday's weather forecast, GY!BE's music has evolved from prophetic warning to something approaching documentary realism.

While "G_d's Pee At State's End!" doesn't quite scale the towering heights of their early trilogy, it confirms that Godspeed You! Black Emperor remains our most essential chroniclers of civilizational decay. In a world that seems increasingly determined to soundtrack its own destruction with the musical equivalent of elevator music, we need these Montreal prophets more than ever, reminding