Three 65, Day 10
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada

Rateyourmusic.com ranked this as the best EP of all time, and they just might be right.

Slow Riot is a bit of an enigma at first - just look at the packaging, which opens backwards (in honor of the Hebrew on the cover, which is read from right to left); the band's name, and the song titles, are nowhere to be found, and the title exists only on the spine. To make things even more threatening, the back (front) cover has a diagram for making a Molotov cocktail... in Italian.

So what gives? Godspeed You! Black Emperor has never been one for easy answers, and that's the point: There are no easy answers, especially for music as complicated and intriguing as that found here. A large ensemble instrumental group, Godspeed specializes in orchestral music - from a basic rock band format - that builds and builds to a crescendo, and then levels off, often with found sounds and samples thrown into the mix.

The first of two tracks, "Moya," follows the band's usual pattern: quiet-quieter-loud-LOUD-deafening. As the music grows, so does the emotional resonance, even though the song might not be specifically about anything in particular. The strings mount, slowly but surely, until what began as a quiet semi-classical piece takes on a swirling roar of its own. Of even greater interest is the follow-up track, "Blaise Bailey Finnegan III." Although the template is the same here, the song is given time to slack off near the end of its 17-minute, 45-second length. This, and the quiet opening, finds room for the samples, which feature an interview with an angry man who recounts the tale of paying a parking ticket and berating a brow-beating judge. Later, he reads a "poem" he wrote, only to rattle off the lyrics to Iron Maiden's "Virus."

What does it all mean? Who the fuck knows? Godspeed have always been stridently anti-commercial (their last album featured a diagram linking four major record labels to various arms manufacturers), even, at one point, calling Radiohead to task for their willingness to play ball with EMI. The anti-American sentiments on "Finnegan" - which, mind you, are made by the song's subject, and not the band - strike a chord with me, but the music is strong enough to stand on its own merits without requiring any kind of message. Which is sort of the point.