The arrival of Godspeed’s debut album was like a thunderclap in many corners of underground music in 1997, with the Montreal collective, for all of its lineup fluctuations and tendency to play things out just to find out where they would go, creating not only a stellar starting point for itself but for what would become post-rock as a whole. The opening song “The Dead Flag Blues,” with its combination of spoken-word description of a corrupt city and an apocalyptic musical build, set the tone for much that would follow from the group.