>>260
Sur Discogs :
GYBE is pretty much over at this point.
Like many fans (my age? LoL), I was pretty gutted when they called it quits at Yanqui UXO, and even though that would have been a decent end, I/we all knew they’d be back…. didn’t really expect it to take like a full decade, but whatevs. Sadly what they emerged with after a decade was a massive head-scratcher, and little did I know that was just the beginning.
I remember listening to that Allelujah album and just wondering when it starts? They dropped actual composition and instead just recorded a bunch of amp feedback, what the? I guess they were riding the wave of hipster Sunn O))) wannabe ‘drone’ shit which was inexplicably a thing at the time? More puzzling when you consider this has always been a band of Pioneers, not followers. What’s incomprehensible to me is the (live bootleg) track Gamelan is actually wonderful. They somehow took it into a studio and turned it to garbage. I still love that bootleg, especially the ending is pretty epic, but the whole thing was captivating. They should have just released that. They turned it into slop. I remember reading somewhere that the album was just going to be a re-recorded Gamelan and I was super excited, but they dragged it through the mud in the end. Albanian was always boring and forgettable though, and I can’t really tell the difference between that and the Mladic remake + don’t really care to make the effort now. And 2 filler tracks they couldn't have spent more than half an hour on. But all the professional reviewers were ejaculating because I guess… you know…. 10 year comeback and all that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That’s all it takes to make a 10/10 album now I guess. Old mate Aphex Twin knows what I’m talking about.
Super psyched to see another album coming out after that – the Behemoth album/song. I hadn't heard the live bootleg this time round, but... Another massive WTF? There’s a bit of actual music in the 1st track, and at the end of the 4th and that’s it – just more amp feedback otherwise. Let me clarify here that I actually really love drone. Maybe more than most people – I’ve got almost all the albums by the aforementioned Sunn O))) and the sister band Earth, some duplicate copies even, I’m a massive fan of old Synth drone music like Éliane Radigue, Musique Concrète/Electroacoustic stuff (Jean-Claude Eloy’s Gaku-No-Michi was my album of the year) modern stuff like NWW & Celer and even some more unusual droney stuff like Tibetan chanting music. I mean, I can’t really wrap my head around how drone somehow became mainsteam and all the hipsters started doing it, or why GYBE felt they needed a slice, but I dunno, same thing happened with Black Metal so, strange world, I digress. The difference is, those droney acts/musicians are all doing something interesting, or it’s an interesting thing doing something droney. Jamie Drouin's 'hum' is just a recording of electrical boxes and I bought it twice. At least that's not a sound U hear on literally every album. Comparatively, GYBE has just settled for an amp and a violin both playing a F# or something for 10+ mins. I guess if you find a deep meaning in that, you’re the type of 4’33” dork that spends time inserting aforementioned deep meaning into where there otherwise was none, in apologia of an empirically shit song. It's amp feedback dawg, no more, no less. Anyway back to the point, that Behemoth album was another massive letdown, so I held out for yet another year, more hopeful this time, with the knowledge that they had finally finished off all those decades old re-recorings and the hope they'd moved onto something fresh…
…and wouldn’t you know it, the Luciferian album was exactly the same thing! There is one emotional bit in ‘Anthem for no state’ and I think a cool bit in Track 2, and that’s it… more amp-feedback crap! Does anyone know if this is also just old songs they phoned-in-uhh .. I mean...rerecorded? Nah, don't answer that. Writer’s block happens to the best of us. Writer’s block for 3 consecutive records, after a hiatus that lasted a quarter of my freaken lifetime, is pretty dang unforgiveable. Look me in the eye and tell me there isn't more depth in that little steam train sample from their 1st album than in these 3 albums combined. I’ve pretty much lost interest in GYBE now, although in all honesty their last album State’s End is actually a pretty good semi-return to form – it’s definitely no Antennas, or even a single disc off that album, but fingers crossed for the next one… Or perhaps I’m just the real sucker here – holding out endlessly for each new record to be a true sequel to Y.UXO? I should presuppose the next album to just be F# amp feedback and save myself the disappointment while I’m ahead. I still do listen to Yanqui/Antennas and Zero Kanada and stuff like that. I’m glad someone found the old Hairy Amp demo and that got released, cuz that’s actual music too, but these new albums are boring as hell.
They've been coasting on their good name for sometime now, so much so that their career can now be separated into two very distinct halves - one good, one shit. They need to focus less on meaningless tags in their album art like “bleakly hopeful” whatever that cheesy hipster dogshit even means, and get back to actually expressing themselves through their instruments. GYBE didn't technically end after Y.UXO, but in a way they did. RIP for now.