Godflesh – A World Lit Only By Fire

Avalanche

Gigantic oxygen-snatching riffery, scorched parabolic vocals… Godflesh are back, as strong as ever. 2000’s Hymns seems in comparison a mild precursor to an all together heavier rebirth, something that June’s Decline And Fall EP hinted at. This is an unbelievably loud album even by Godflesh standards, a holy trinity of bass, guitar and drum machine whose energy is always pushing against its own thresholds without caring what lies beyond, escaping potential sink holes through sheer physical force.

A momentum tailored to grab your attention, sometimes winching like a salted wound, a beast greasily caught in its own convulsive knots, other times more adrenalin-poured, thumbing holes for zither fruit to prod their frosty fingers through. The bass always goading the machine’s clean lines in sandpapery recoil, wire you can literally see vibrating, those plummets of screeching surge sending out impressions that nothing’s half-hearted nor lost to self indulgence. A drama wrought in such a way as to keep your head nodding along, mind attentive to the twisted vents as they release exquisite trenches of  charred  melody, and  harmonies… yes, harmonies that seem to ghost the splintered skyline like withering vapours of civilisation.

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You definitely can’t avoid the sense that Broadrick and Green still feel the injustice, want to expel their frustrations; at one point it actually sounds like fists hitting metal walls, for heaven’s sake. Everything seems to be stung constantly in lashing currents, whips that tear at that straitjacket of austerity that privilege knows nothing of. An overbearing brutality that holds a mirror to the hatred that’s always greedy to feast on our better natures, taint our glowing achievements. An energy that disregards mealy-mouthed  pleasantries, political spin, that butchery of language that hides too many lies, deceits, carving it all up with simple directness. An empowerment that zoom-fodders the bombardment like lit petroleum streaks, the meaning sometimes obscured, swamped in glistening muscle, dragged on its own yelled inertia like an inarticulate lance that pierces deeper than words ever could.

Glad to have you back, boys.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-