Jesu’s Infin­ity is a new album length com­po­si­tion that should more rightly be clas­si­fied as opera given the struc­ture and effort that Justin Broad­rick has given this lat­est taste of his unique style of rock music. Halfway through my first lis­ten I started won­der­ing what Wag­ner would be doing if he would was alive today, and fig­ured that if he had been asked to arrange Slayer’s cover of a Pink Floyd tune, it might come out sound­ing like Infin­ity. The back­wards delay-effected gui­tar of the “pre­lude” por­tion of this epic serves this oper­atic anal­ogy well. While eas­ing you into the expe­ri­ence, it at once sounds noth­ing like what comes after­wards while at the same time intro­duc­ing the themes and atmos­phere of you’ll hear through­out. The first act begins with a pum­mel­ing drum and heav­ily dis­torted gui­tar riff, topped with the dis­tinct pierc­ing high fre­quency gui­tar that Broad­rick has made his sig­na­ture. As the song tran­si­tions into the sec­ond act, we real­ize that Broadrick’s gui­tar is the pri­mary actor on stage. When he sings, you can hear dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters com­ing on stage to inter­act with our pro­tag­o­nists. A gruffer retro-Godflesh voice comes on to dis­play per­haps not the vil­lain or antag­o­nist but pos­si­bly the inner tur­moil of the main char­ac­ter. Bring­ing back this rarely heard vocal style into a Jesu com­po­si­tion is shock­ing but appro­pri­ate for a long con­cept piece like this. As soon as this intense sec­tion ends, we are treated to a beau­ti­ful inter­lude of ethe­real har­mon­ics with a slowly build­ing bed of feed­back and gen­tle gui­tar. This inter­lude pro­pels into the sec­ond half of per­for­mance, where things move much slower and ele­gantly, the vocals yearn­ing for com­pan­ion­ship the actor doesn’t feel wor­thy of. This tor­tured sec­tion feels like the por­tion of the opera where our hero strug­gles to bring about his ulti­mate goals. It’s pos­si­bly the most pow­er­ful sec­tion, the lead gui­tar melody repeat­ing amidst the distortion-laden land­scape, the drums beat­ing slowly. From the con­tem­pla­tive and hope­ful sound­ing end sec­tions, I can only sur­mise the story is resolved pos­i­tively. The lilt­ing gui­tar of the denoue­ment fades away into twi­light, leav­ing us to reflect about the infin­ity of strug­gle and sound that sur­rounds us everyday.

You can hear an excerpts from Infin­ity at Jesu’s Myspace. As an extra, below is a free mp3 from Jesu’s forth­com­ing EP for Mark Kozelek’s Caldo Verde Records.
“Deflated” from Opi­ate Sun (mp3)