SOUL MEN: Even punished by the low ceilings of the Middle East, Jesu’s mix was spacious. |
“Some religious music,” wrote the late, great Whitney Balliett, jazz critic for the New Yorker, “shines with evil.” Reversing the proposition, we could say with equal justice that some very evil-sounding music is — in its heart — ablaze with sanctity. Justin Broadrick from Birmingham, England (home of Black Sabbath and Duran Duran), has been making sheer, brain-scraping noises with his guitar for more than 20 years as a member of Napalm Death and Head of David, and in his own outfit Godflesh. Under the latter name he more or less invented industrial metal, by coiling and extending the pagan guitar lines of Killing Joke’s Geordie around the clatter of an Alesis-16 drum machine, singing in a staccato roar, and occasionally chilling the whole thing down to a glacial Swans-like crawl. The imagery was all abjection and alienness, but through his music’s long romance with inhumanity Broadrick has maintained a suffering and very human presence at its center: his voice has always had pathos, his melodies are lamentations, and his stretched, choral guitar sound, a sort of antagonizing of the sublime, has been transcendent even when the rhythms beneath it have been pure oppression.
Godflesh ended in 2002, by which point Broadrick had the mighty Ted Parsons, formerly of Swans and Prong, drumming for him. With Parsons he went on to form Jesu — pronounced Latin fashion, with the “J” like a “Y,” as we discovered last Saturday night downstairs at the Middle East. Jesu were opening for Isis, and a capacity crowd of art-metal kids gave Broadrick and mates Diarmuid Dalton (bass) and Danny Walker (sitting in for Parsons on drums) a big hand.
As the names suggest, from Godflesh to Jesu a kind of Gnostic progression has taken place: the tortured dualism of former times, the ugly/beautiful noise, has been resolved in the direction of divinity. It’s still heavy as shit, lumberingly paced, with Dalton stroking huge shudders of sound from his bass, but the music has been lifted into a thick ambient haze: the guitar climbs through rainbow bands of distortion, and brief melodic figures occur at very high frequencies, with the rhythm of chimes or sobs. Broadrick now sings in a chanting murmur, through loops of delay, and triggers samples as required. If it sounds complicated, it ain’t: the opening “We All Falter” had the godlike simplicity of a Lungfish song. Even punished by the low ceilings of the Middle East, the mix was spacious. And, staggering and turning through the endless slow crescendos, and then standing, empty-eyed and slack-mouthed as white light poured from his guitar, Broadrick was transported. He’s done very well, this man. It’s time he had his success, and reaped his acclaim, now that he’s given us the beginnings of soul metal.
