Originally published in Arthur No. 15 (Jan 2005)

“Metal for Wintertime”
by James Parker

Reviewed:

JESU
Jesu
(HydraHead)

HIGH ON FIRE
Blessed Black Wings
(Relapse)

OM
Variations On A Theme
(Holy Mountain)

DEAD MEADOW
Feathers
(Matador)

What a band was Godflesh. In the person of Justin Broadrick, with his combat boots, and his black clothes, and his electrode-ready shaved head, and his searing, clattering guitar tone, and his militant drum machine, and the traumatic circular lurching and nodding thing he would do onstage (which recalled to me unavoidably the movements of a cage-maddened polar bear I once saw in London’s Regents Park Zoo), a particular strand of post-punk disgust seemed to have fused—at very high pressure—with a severe religious impulse: here, one sensed, was a real ascetic, a world-class world-rejector. Of course, there was a lot of it about at the time —Eighties, early Nineties. Plenty of bands were disgusted, there were plenty of bleak and black-clad zealots with guitars for whom flesh was pain, existence gaol and society nothing but a species of sausage-grinder, but with Broadrick all that grimness and refusal was sublimed into something beautiful. Like a proper heretic, like a martyr in an El Greco painting, he had his eyes on the beyond; he was going down to rise above; even in Godflesh’s sickest, most imploded moments you could still hear that rage for transcendence. Slavestate… mindfuck… circle of shit etc (this was the tenor of Godflesh lyrics). Vivisection… the void… blah. But there was always beauty, somewhere about. On a chemical trace of melody Broadrick could compose an anthem.

Almost in passing, wrestling with machines, he invented industrial metal, Fear Factory and I don’t know who else, but Godflesh was never so much about ‘musical development’ as it was about the steady excavation and elaboration of a mindset, the dogged unburying of psychic material. The final album, Hymns, was the masterpiece—higher and heavier than ever. Ted Parsons (Swans, Prong) played drums, and that was beautiful—instead of the pedantic tang! tang! of the artificial ride we had the knelling cymbal-strokes of Ted, making his powerful human difference. He’s playing again in Jesu, Broadrick’s new thing, now here with a self-titled album. In Jesu all the high-low dualisms of Godflesh are magnified—decelerated, chilled down and magnified. The music moves with a dolorous processional slowness, at times hitting Swans-speed – that castigating trudge—but layered over the top is all manner of loveliness. Guitars prickle and expire over glacial, grinding bass-phrases. Keyboards float, entranced, above gulfs of noise. You need your ears for this one; there are exquisite and almost-painful things going on in the upper frequencies. (Swans-meets-My Bloody Valentine? I’m no good with the rockcrit formulae.) Broadrick sings for the most part in a prayer-like murmur, with reverb bouncing his prayers back at him—“I know the stones I’ve thrown/ They come back twice as strong”—and refrigerated puffs of ambience sailing by. (Swans-meets-My Bloody Valentine-meets-Boards Of Canada? On Ketamine? Still no good.) Passages of Jesu are crushingly beautiful—really. I almost cried.

The press release from Holy Mountain pluckily hails the new Om CD (their first) as “the triumphant return of two-thirds of Sleep!” Might have been a good name for the record, that—Two Thirds of Sleep. Better, perhaps, than Variations On a Theme which is its actual title. Anyway, two-thirds of Sleep is what we have here: drummer Chris Hakius and bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros, who earned their place in history as Matt Pike’s partners on the monumental Jerusalem, 52 minutes of bloody-fingered bong-metal mastery. In the great fission of Sleep Pike went flaming off with the high end and the songs, leaving Hakius and Cisneros to rumble along the drone-continuum in 20-minute guitar-free groove orgies. A vast monotony presides over the Om project, from the affectless ‘zen’ singing to the unsmiling, weed-inflated lyrics—“latitudinal ground elliptic motion sets Unveil” (alright!)—but Cisneros and Hakius do make a lovely racket together, a fluid, inventive Sabbath-esque churn, and besides, monotony is clearly the point: chamber upon chamber of nullity: I mean, how high are you, anyway? Because Om are ready for you, they’ll go there, they LIVE there, they’ll play through these rocking sludge-cycles until Time peels back and the imp Infinity tips his tiny red hat.

Blessed Black Wings, High On Fire’s third album, is produced by Steve Albini. What a pleasure that was to type. I’ll do it again. Blessed Black Wings, High On Fire’s third album, is produced by Steve Albini. It’s a metalhead’s wet dream: HOF’s mad-dog pummelling preserved for us with the crushing exactness, the awesome pedantry of the recorder Albini, every ‘i’ dotted and ‘t’ crossed. HOF is of course the baby of Matt Pike, the other third of Sleep, and Blessed Black Wings is everything we’d hoped it might be. “Devilution,” the opener, is fantasyland—Des Kensel’s warrior-charge toms fading thunderously in, a riff that sounds like Hell clearing its throat and then Pike hits us with the screaming heavy metal prophecy: “MAN’S DONE! BABYLON! EAT THE FRUIT DIVINE!” You won’t hear anything more thrilling this year. The chorus could be Discharge. Conspicuous lack of interest in tunes has never been an obstacle to heaviness; Pike’s warthog shriek regularly falls to pieces and his solos have a kind of sealed autistic fury to them, but this is the glory of HOF—their bestial limitedness. Did I say bestial? I meant beastious, as in “Stepping on the curse/Inflicting its beastious wounds” (“Cometh Down Hessian”). The point is, HOF keep it narrow. They keep it bloody. They keep it orc-like. Which is smart; there are a couple of “interludes” on Blessed Black Wings, moments of quasi-lyricism when Pike dips the volume, climbs off the effects pedal and twanks a few melodically-organised notes, and it sounds like he’s playing with mittens on.

A couple of things have changed. Theres’s a new bassist here: Joe Preston. And while one regrets the passing of George Rice, with his excellently un-metal name, from the ranks of HOF, Preston (ex-Melvins, Thrones, Earth) clearly has the pedigree for the job. Also, on Blessed Black Wings HOF have rediscovered forward motion, with that “Ace Of Spades”-style oompah! oompah! that no one really does anymore. It suits them, to a degree—they can flail along. Me, I liked it when their music just STUCK, roiling and roaring in circles and vortices, impaled on a single point of intensity (see “Hung Drawn and Quartered” from the last album.) But what the fuck, this is an amazing record. It kills. It’s totally beastious.

I’m sure DC’s Dead Meadow have had quite enough of being called a comedown band, but really, the new record Feathers is such a nice place to regather your shredded faculties. Gently lumbering drums, body-temperature bass, Jason Simon’s trailing, gaseous tenor and incense-laden guitar, now and then the leviathanic stirring of a riff—the brain’s root gets a solid, loving massage. Anton “Send the waitress up here RIGHT NOW!” Newcombe, from the Brian Jonestown Massacre, has produced them (not this album) which makes sense; Dead Meadow have BJM’s shimmering near-vapidity, the airy jingle-jangle, but there’s muscle in here too, some proper dead-eyed Om-Style groove commitment, boring backwards through hard rock into a gaping psychedelic sprawl. Fairies wear boots, as Ozzy observed. I don’t have the lyrics in front of me, but I’m told that they are fantasy-encrusted, steeped in Tolkienry etc. Sounds fine—you can never have too many elves—although in the general drifting-off of Simon’s vocals one hears not legends or narratives but fugues, suspensions—self-doubting orcs, doped-out dwarves looking muzzily at their dropped tools. It’s gorgeous, utterly. The ground shifts, the music raves and sways. Watch the princes shed their armor. Come on down!