When I was in high school, my musi­cal hero was Justin K. Broad­rick, the singer/guitarist of God­flesh. At the time, I was fully immersed in indus­trial music, and Broadrick’s name was plas­tered over every­thing I liked. It was pretty soon that I was track­ing down every obscure release I could find that he was involved in. From the Sweet Tooth album that took me a few years to find to every sin­gle release by God, the free jazz super­group run by Kevin Mar­tin. I even have the 2 bru­tal remixes that Broad­rick did of Pan­tera — a holy grail if there ever was one back in those days. At last count, I have 36 CDs with Broadrick’s involve­ment some­where on them. His long ambi­ent feed­back pieces like the one on Pure, the first Techno-Animal album Ghosts, and his solo work as Final were lovely, patient, and rid­ing a fine line between gen­res. After time, I fell out of love with fol­low­ing his music for var­i­ous rea­sons. But I still love the stuff he did from that time period, and so it’s really odd for me to sud­denly be lis­ten­ing to new music from Broad­rick. When Jesu burst on the scene last year or so, I was imme­di­ately intrigued, but sim­ply never got around to hear­ing it. About a month ago, though, I heard a track from this new album, Con­queror, and it astounded me. So much so that I ran out to get the self-titled debut album and the ridicu­lously beau­ti­ful Sil­ver EP. It’s just really odd to be a Broad­rick fan 10 years later. This is def­i­nitely the end result of his Godflesh’s lat­ter years (when JKB started singing instead of shout­ing) and his solo work as Final. An empha­sis on envelop­ing melancholy/beauty, still with the big gui­tars and crush­ing drums, but the com­po­si­tions evolve and expand, inter­twin­ing the doom with hope and rev­er­ence. They are much more pure, if pos­si­ble. Broad­rick is singing his heart out here, and push­ing all the emo­tion out through the feed­back and dis­tor­tion. If Sil­ver was start­ing to bring some MBV ten­den­cies into the mix, Con­queror builds on that, mak­ing each song an epic and out­reach­ing sym­phony. The lilt­ing open­ing vocal sounds on “Con­queror” echo the crash­ing beat and give you an indi­ca­tion of the par­tic­u­lar sub­ject mat­ter of this music: gut­tural emo­tion, awk­ward­ness, pen­sive­ness. The heav­ily effected gui­tars lend a science-fiction feel to this, fur­ther­ing the majesty and feel­ings of being alone in wide open spaces. It’s gor­geous. This is deep and pur­pose­ful music.
“Con­queror” (mp3)