Godflesh/Philippe Petit (live at Le Korigan)

Aix-en-Provence
19 May 2013

A night of metal and more in one of the heartlands of Provence; not an area generally well-known for its enthusiasm for all things dark and loud. Luynes is a placid near-suburb of Aix-en-Provence, and close enough to Marseille to bring a decent audience from the current European Capital of Culture and beyond, but Le Korigan (a mischievous Breton elf-like creature – none more metal a name) is also far enough from the neighbours to avoid putting them out of sorts.

The venue, part rehearsal studio, instrument repair centre and music school and part sweaty rock club, is also a haven of noise and subcultural bandname-swapping among the crowd gathered outside to smoke and chat patiently while awaiting the opening of the doors. Lurking nonchalantly among the picturesque villas of a well-to-do town which is sometimes referred to jokingly as Paris’ twenty-first arrondissment (complete with its own Métro station, or at least high-speed train stop). Once inside though, the ambience changes and it could easily be any rock club in any place where the tattooed gather, soon to join together in amplifier worship and other such activities.

First up on the agenda is the whirl of sound generated by Philippe Petit‘s setup of electronics and the fearsome sounds of a self-assembled stringed instrument matched with Lee Zeirjick‘s guitar, which rides the feedback waves in misty-backed drives. Initially, the sounds are throttled back, splintered both electronically and at the strings of the guitar, Petit spasming and stabbing at his controls in just the way that so many laptop and FX-box performers don’t, giving the performance an edgy vitality matched by Zeirjick’s animated guitar antics. The duo give their all, making a full-spectrum sound sputter and jangle in bit-crunched style, the guitar wails and whammied groans sparking off Petit’s processed sound fragments as a mighty bass grind shifts the air to stir the fringes of the audience’s clothing.

Their set morphs from abstractly-structured drone and free-ish noises into more stridently -delivered assaults on the senses, Zeirjick’s deracinated rock’n’roll tropes colliding brusquely against the hard place of Petit’s atonal electronica. The latter vocalises shrieks and caterwauls like a man possessed by his music, gibbering in tongues as the Zeirjick slams his instrument into FX-smothered submission, and their short but intense set is over.

Broadrick is frenetic, never standing still for more than a beat of the crushing rhythms as he flails and wrestles with his instrument

After a false start due to technical difficulties, with a fresh guitar waved triumphantly aloft by Justin Broadrick as he calls out a cheerily ironic “good night,” Godflesh bring the noise in earnest. And some noise it is too, the drum machine and GC Green‘s bass shuddering through the crowd (apparently their smallest on this their first European tour in some six years) and into the fibre of the black-painted walls. Where Green is solid, holding down a steady grind, Broadrick is frenetic, never standing still for more than a beat of the crushing rhythms as he flails and wrestles with his instrument. Provoking an equally energetic – at least in their collectively-banged heads – response in a goodly portion of the crowd, Godflesh set about their relentlessly heavy business.

Godflesh in full live effect become something close to the definition of metal – ironically so in band who when they first toured the hair-metal venues of the USA in the Eighties were greeted as the iconoclastic progenitors of a fresh wave of what would eventually be dubbed industrial metal. With a drum machine in place of a drummer, they ratcheted down the brutal aggression of the grindcore of the likes of Broadrick’s old band Napalm Death to a slower extreme, rather than using, say, Iron Maiden as a template. Godflesh strip everything back to the bared-teeth raging essentials, not exactly minimal as such, but distilled and made all the more potent for its proximity. The placement of their sound drives not just directly into the ears, but to the centre of the body with an almost Platonic force of its essential heaviness.

Through the application of brittle synthetic percussion, the unrelenting pounding of the bass (rumbling until each and every knee towards the front of the audience has little choice but to tremble) and the ever-moving snarl and whine of the guitar, they are hellbent on pulverisation of the two hundred-odd bodies crammed into the venue. The sound here is crisp and crystal-clear, and Godflesh are no sludge band who rely on overwhelming splurge and spluttering effects to plot their dense trajectory of vitriol – each wave of noise is finely-judged in its intensity and razor-sharp in application. Broadrick’s harsh, impassioned vocal invective communicates an ire which is delivered with an almost palpable sense of despair at just how much wrong has been done by itself to humanity, often in the name of religion. This is backed up by a torrent of fiery crosses, images of death, destruction, the terrors a holocaust of every sort can bring and sliding close-ups of Hieronomous Bosch‘s depictions of hell which flicker on the back projections which underpin every song.

As the set continues its battering, beat-driven delirium, the intensity is frozen momentarily in the flailed mass of hair under the flickering strobes, the band backlit as the room is smoked up and enveloped in sound. Green wields  his bass to match the the machine beats being driven home implacably like tremendously heavy nails heated to 200 degrees by Broadrick’s incendiary guitar, played with  virtuosity without the bluesy technicality of so many metal guitarists. And while much of the thematic imagery, visual and poetic, of Godflesh’s songs is directly concerned with the results of religiosity, Broadrick’s stage persona is not in the least demonic, but simply human, angry and accusatory, and all the more effective for it. “Control,” he growls during “Pure”, its urgently danceable rhythm subsumed by the distortion and feedback and extreme amounts of strobe. But for who?

“Live Godflesh,” says the DVD title screen on the back projection when it finishes, well before the band have smashed out their final chord and thudding drumbeat. Tonight it’s truly been flensed, carved and rendered, served fresh by the kiloton.

-Richard Fontenoy-