this is the disc where they first defined themselves as something a little bit out of the ordinary and cemented themselves as an act that was worth paying attention to.sharing a label with godspeed you black emperor brought a lot of fans out to their shows, including myself, who simply assumed that they would be brilliant by association. this initially cast sort of a shadow on the band, which unfortunately delegated them as a sort of "minor-godspeed" with horns in place of strings, the "jazz godspeed" if you will. while this ultimately worked in the band's favour, the band very quickly broke out of this pigeonhole. there are certainly aesthetic similarities that may dominate upon the first listen or two but the connection is more reducible to the genre being relatively novel. to be clear, all of this music ultimately traces back to a composer from new york by the name of glenn branca who wrote massive "guitar symphonies", but they generally tended to come out sounding messy and awkward, more like early sonic youth than like the tight, polished products that started coming out of canada in the mid-90s. it won't take more than two listens to conclude that do make say think and godspeed you black emperor do not sound remotely similar at all.the tracks on the first disc were loose, wandering jams that rarely had a driving force. most of these tracks are driven by interlocking "angular" guitar parts that eventually build upon themselves into thick crescendos that climax with driven effects pedals, blaring horn parts and independent dual drum parts, generally split into left and right channels. the interlocking guitars, which often also interlock with bass parts into something that is best labelled as counterpoint, split the disc into very structured movements.today's music theory lesson is in voice leading. voice leading is about ensuring that independent notes by independent musicians playing independent instruments converge to construct logical chord progressions. it is the deep secret of do make say think's ability to produce swirling soups of overtones that sound more like an orchestra than like a five-piece band jamming in a barn - and, yes, the legends are true, this was recorded in a barn. now, the thing about voice leading is that it's a double-edged sword. first, it ensures that the songs sound "correct" to western ears. second, it gives the artists the ability to tear the whole thing down at a moment's notice and produce the most dissonant sounding disaster that you've ever heard. these moments coincide with the climaxes at the top of the crescendos, and are either articulated with trumpets screwing around in quite purposefully completely out of key modes or with heavily distorted electric guitars bending and tremoloing rusty strings into microtonal oblivion, all fused together in sporadically modulating, if fairly standard, time signatures.the flow on the disc is also something to point out. the songs seem to have been segued together in such a way as to eliminate any kind of empty space, which is likely what harris newman is credited for in the liner notes. this gives the disc the feel of a large work, and it is indeed constructed like one.there are some records that are central to musical climates and will forever be inseparably tied to genres, eras and geography. this is one of them; it defines post-rock in southern ontario c. 2000 like perhaps no other.