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Jesu, "Silver"
If Jesu is any indication, putting Godflesh in the grave was the best thing that Justin Broadrick could have done with his lumbering behemoth of a legacy. Jesu's latest is a return to the slow grinding despair of Godflesh's Merciless EP, something that Broadrick does better than most.
For my money, Merciless was the high water mark for Broadrick's previous rock band, and it's a sound I had always hoped he'd return to. Instead, Godflesh's last gasps were sputtered out over experiments with breakbeats and dub remixes that were often brutally straight-forward, leaving little of the suspense and weight of the band's earlier material. Jesu fixes all of that, calmly picking up where Broadrick left off before the excursions into proto-jungle metal hybrids, something that given Broadrick's skill as a drum n bass producer always seemed less exciting than they should.
Silver is a return to the long, morose, damaged songs to which Broadrick simply owns the trademark. His signature guitar sound and wall of drone and noise is all over this EP, along with the long delaying echoes of tortured moaning that he uses for singing in this mode. What's noticeably absent and what keeps this from sounding fully like a Godflesh project with another name is the clacky rumble of Ben Green's bass. Blasphemous though it may sound, I don't miss that on Silver. Without the bass mixed to the front of each song, the layers and textures have more room to breath and develop, giving the songs something closer to a meditative feel. If I had to explain this quickly, I'd say that Jesu is a bit like the Godflesh take on the Kranky sound, and when I think of it like that, it's no wonder that Jesu is responsible for some of my favorite records in the last year.
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