Top 100 Albums 2000-2009: #4

4. Do Make Say Think – Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord is Dead (2000, Constellation)

Although Godspeed You! Black Emperor are widely considered the forefathers of Canada’s dark, epic post-rock family, I’ve always greatly preferred the jazzy, cinematic bent of their musical cousins, Do Make Say Think.

In a lot of ways, this album represents everything this list is supposed to be about: it was released in 2000, so it’s been around for the full ten years in question, and over those ten years, I’ve listened to it countless times and never tire of those seven songs. It still stirs up strong emotion in me even after all these years, each song tied to some memory or some story or some fantasy in my head. And the amazing part is, I keep adding meaning to the music through its association with parts of my life, and all that meaning just stacks together and becomes something bigger. I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s chilling novel of survival, The Road, in three or four sittings, and each time, I allowed myself to listen only to Do Make Say Think. It was the absolute perfect music to go with the book, and now when I listen to their music there’s a bit of that in there as well: the man, the boy, the bullet with one gun left. It fits together perfectly.

The music itself is stark, relatively sparse, and sparingly produced. There are hints of smoky jazz, dusty Americana and even dark surf-rock within the album’s forty-eight minutes, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is timeless, challenging instrumental music, not always pretty, but always compelling. And its overwhelmingly cinematic quality is what keeps me coming back. “When Day Chokes the Night” is tensely repetitive until it spills into strange jazz fight music, horns twisting and wailing like an angrier, more aggressive Mulatu Astatke. “Minmin” moves at a pensive shuffle, breaking into a bright-yet-understated gallop for the song’s latter half. “The Landlord is Dead” is meant to be movie music, jazzy and ominous, the sound of something big about to happen. And happen it does. Twangy distorted guitars give way to a screaming, Godspeed-esque guitar assault that sounds like the zombie apocalypse (this song would have been perfect in 28 Days Later), a full-on violent storm that ends as abruptly as it started. “The Apartment Song” is a western movie send-up, spacious and open like the desert, mostly slow and deliberate, with a few jarring, dirty-guitar breakdowns.

Triumph!

“All of This is True” is one of the album’s standout tracks, a long, slowly-unfolding story told with spacey organs, carefully plucked guitar lines, horns pulsing like blinking lights. Three-quarters into the song, a track of ambient sound reveals itself, the sound of people talking and children playing. The reverb-laden ride cymbal makes it sound like it’s snowing. The song’s last few minutes are composed only of percussion and this ambient crowd noise, the former slowly giving way to the latter. Faintly, before the song ends, you can hear a boy shout, “Merry Christmas, everybody!” and I smile a little every time I hear that. “Bruce E Kinesis” is a mood piece, with bending, droning organs and a chiming guitar loop and drums that sound like they’re coming from far away, maybe underwater. “Goodbye Enemy Airship,” the album’s 12-minute closer, has two distinct sections: a brooding first third with faintly triumphant horns buried deep in the mix and Shaft-like percussion, and then after a near-silent break, the song bursts back into the theme established by the opening, but with layers and layers of ambient noise that makes you feel like you’re floating in a stadium-sized planetarium—or maybe just actually in space.

The album plays like seven separate stories that contribute to a larger piece, some told-long-ago epic of human struggle, or maybe a love story. As is the case with a lot of ambient post-rock, the titles are vague, the story left mostly to the listener to figure out. And that’s most of the fun: figuring out what this music means to you. It’s impossible to adequately describe here what it does for me, but I can tell you this: in the movie in my head, Do Make Say Think compose the score.

Click below to listen to “The Landlord is Dead,” and insert your own zombie movie fantasies accordingly.