Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Yanqui U.X.O.

Yanqui U.X.O. arrived in November 2002 and then Godspeed You! Black Emperor disappeared for a decade. Recorded by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio and mixed at the Hotel2Tango, it is the band's leanest and angriest record — no field recordings, no found monologues, just five instrumental pieces played with the amps turned up and the politics printed on the sleeve.

The album's back cover famously diagrams the corporate links between major labels and arms manufacturers, and the music matches that bluntness. "Rockets Fall On Rocket Falls" builds over twenty minutes into something genuinely frightening, with Rob Mazurek's trumpet and Matana Roberts' clarinet cutting through the strings. "Motherfucker=Redeemer" closes the record across two parts that feel less like crescendo-rock and more like a slow collapse.

For a band often described as elegiac, this is the one where the anger sits closest to the surface. Essential late-period Constellation.

CD edition in a card sleeve. Constellation, catalog CST024-2.