Album Of The Week: Godspeed You! Black Emperor Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress

When a big and great album comes out, and when we give that big and great album a Premature Evaluation, I often use this space to point out that the album you'll be reading about below isn't the real album of the week; it's the one that ended up in this slot because we already wrote about the big dog in the room. This could be one of those weeks. Sufjan Stevens' lovely and mournful Carrie And Lowell is certainly a hugely important record in Stevens' career, and it's his best work in at least a decade. But it's not clearly the best album of the week. There are a lot of great ones this week. Lower Dens twisted their motorik dreampop toward slow-release pop music on Escape From Evil and came away with something shatteringly beautiful. And Violent Reaction's Marching On is one of the finest, most ferocious slabs of straight-ahead feral hardcore in recent years. Those two albums, along with Carrie And Lowell, are absolutely in conversation for the week's best album. Most weeks, any of those three could've taken the honors. But when Godspeed You! Black Emperor, that shadowy Canadian anarchist collective, rumbles back to life, they have a way of sucking all the oxygen out of the room.