In less than 20 seconds into opening track “Peasantry Or ‘Light! Inside Of Light’” when the whole shit breaks wide open. After a few heartbeat-style drum thunks, the band rips into a titanic, surging riff, a mystic quasi-eastern stomp that any doom metal band in history would be proud to call its own. It’s a huge sound, and Godspeed work it for everything it’s worth. For 10 solid minutes, they ride that riff, traveling with it through mountains and gorges, rising and falling with it. On “Peasantry,” Godspeed sound more like a rock band than they may have ever sounded. In the past, Godspeed’s triumphant loud moments have pulled a ton of their impact from the vast and sometimes laborious stretches of quiet that come before them. But this is Godspeed saying fuck it and jumping straight to loud, then pretty much staying there for a very long time. And it loses none of its impact in the process. There’s beauty in that stomp, especially when guitars and violins come in to play a new melody on top of it. But they always come back to the riff.
If the members of Godspeed ran their band as a business entity, rather than a flickering and mercurial ghost of a thing, they could’ve been the defining film-score composers of our age. (Instead, they ceded some of that position to Explosions In The Sky, who are great but whose sound is a more approachable version of Godspeed’s earth-rumbles.) Things sound bigger and bolder and more emotionally loaded, for whatever reason, when Godspeed’s music is playing. A lonely pigeon flying past your window can look like an ominous harbinger of doom, or like a symbol for collective hope, depending on what part of the album you’re at. With Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress, they’ve cut out some of the more atmospheric elements of their sound — the scratchy found-sound samples, the faraway ambient crackles. But they haven’t lost any of the primal force that makes them something more than a band.
The Fat Angel Sings 