The Dead Flag Blues

It opened Godspeed's first album. On the 1997 LP it was untitled and filled side A, Nervous, Sad, Poor..., moving on into a glockenspiel vignette and a piece for voice and banjo. For the 1998 Kranky CD it was remixed and re-edited, given its name and a new ending, and divided into four parts: the spoken introduction, Slow Moving Trains, The Cowboy... and a short outro. A rumble of drone gives way to a voice that begins "The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel", then to mournful strings and a fragile guitar. After the monologue come the screech and chug of a steam train and slide guitar, then a middle passage Pitchfork likened to a spaghetti western soundtrack.

Menuck wrote the words for Incomplete Movie About Jail, a diary film he meant to keep adding to forever and which stopped once the band became a thing. He asked an old professor of his, who had a great voice, to read them, and the dog barking on the recording was the reader's. Pitchfork heard a ruined city, a corrupt government, a skyline ablaze and a numbed people, with the guitar's arrival as the band playing on as the ship goes down, and tied it to Montreal after the 1995 Quebec referendum. Mark Richardson called it a debut opener to rival Patti Smith's Gloria. The bagpipes that open East Hastings bring its theme back.

Live

The band played it at Symptom Hall in Toronto on 5 October 1997, seven weeks after the LP, and second in the set when it opened for Sonic Youth at Metropolis in Montreal in May 1998. The outro closed sets up to the 2003 hiatus, and a live version from Nantes appeared on the Constellation compilation Song of the Silent Land (2004). It returned at the 2010 reunion shows, and in monumental, from 2016 to 2018, it was played from tape to close the evening. Both uploads in the hypersongs web are the same 16:28 CD recording from the 1998 Kranky edition.