Godspeed You! Black Emperor @ Barrowlands, Glasgow, 18 Sep

Despite the self-consciously daft title of last year’s G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!, a Godspeed You! Black Emperor gig remains a space of singular solemnity and intensity. As they enter one at a time to contribute in turn to an opening drone, the silence and bowed heads of the band members make them feel like monks trying to tap into some collective vision so that they can bring forth their bracing mixture of apocalypse and hope.

This vision is never more apparent than on tonight's superb version of Bosses Hang. It swoops and dives between being huge and anthemic, peppered with cymbal crashes and wild overblown soloing, to coiled and delicate, Ryvita-brittle guitar and strings that flit about like birds in a storm. Even a blown-out violin amp and ten minutes of wandering about the stage with torches don’t kill the track's momentum, as when they slam back in for its final crescendo, it’s with a bracing force, a real testament to their tightness as a band and the overwhelming power of their music when it reaches its peaks. 

That said, for all the desolate clichés that surround them, GY!BE remain at their core a rock band. That's no more apparent than on First of the Last Glaciers which has a bombastic, twanging guitar line that, when allowed to really hammer home in a live setting, feels like the older, harder cousin of Live and Let Die. The same can be said of the cumbersome funk of World Police and Friendly Fire, the bassline rooting the song's latter half as it ratchets up in intensity and speed, and as the string section goes full maelstrom. By the end it sounds like a reel for a galaxy’s final moments before it’s swallowed whole as it orbits a black hole.

Image: Godspeed You! Black Emperor @ Barrowlands by Marilena Vlachopoulou

However the end of the set feels a little fumbled. After a superb run through of iconic The Sad Mafioso, the set ends with a gradual exit, one at a time, the inverse of their entrance. It doesn’t have anything like the same effect as the opening, feeling like a tacked-on period to what could have been a triumphant closing. It’s a shame, as the squall of feedback and drones that ends up closing the set feels primed to build into one of their momentous crescendos, but it is not to be. It ends the set on a slightly anticlimactic note, but nevertheless the fact remains that when Godspeed are in their throes they remain a band, 25 years in, that can only be marvelled at.