Godflesh
Streetcleaner

“Streetcleaner” is not just a masterpiece of industrial metal, one of the most influential chapters in extreme music ever, the perfect vade mecum of how this music should be conceived, composed, and executed. “Streetcleaner” is a work of art, like a Kafka novel, a Cronenberg film, a Giger painting.

On par with these artists, in their imperfection as in their undeniable incisiveness, the Godflesh entity gives us a metaphorical representation of reality, and “Streetcleaner” is a grim fresco, and all the more unsettling precisely because it's realistic—of us and the reality we live in. “You breed like rats, don't look back, you were dead from the start”: this is the chilling sentence that opens the psychoanalytic session to which humanity is subjected, a squalid and unpleasant journey, just like the reality it intends to describe. A journey that climbs through Kafkaesque labyrinths, Orwellian nightmares, Cronenbergian threats, landscapes worthy of the most perverse Giger. No concession to hope, no better future on the horizon. Light-years away from the glee and sarcasm of fellow Ministry, Justin Broadrick prefers to draw from the obsessive and alienated world of Swans and Killing Joke, naturally without forgetting the grindcore reminiscences inherited from the Napalm Death days.

Accompanied by bassist B. Christian Green, with the rhythms entirely entrusted to machines, Broadrick is finally free to express his ego and totally abandon himself to his obsessions. While the industrial creed imposes the massive use of samples and aims at a stylization of played music, Broadrick retains his love for his instrument, his approach remains physical, and his guitar, forge of alienation and obsession, paradoxically becomes something in continuous evolution: among paranoid riffs and swirling feedback whirlwinds, among obsessive repetitions and imperceptible theme variations, Broadrick's visionary and expressionistic art is that of an idealized Hendrix employed in an assembly line, of a Bach digging a street with a pneumatic drill, of a Van Gogh forced to use cans of rust for his paintings. Broadrick, aside from analysis, is the true father of post-metal, and to him, bands like Tool and Isis owe much, if not everything. But his greatest merit is having elevated a genre as physical and pragmatic as metal to artistic vision and a metaphorical representation of reality. The disjointed pulsation of the drum-machine evokes the repeated gestures, the frenzy of everyday life, the objectification of life, now stripped of all emotion and spiritual foundation. The bass blasts are the creaking of the gears and pistons of the great Machine. The guitar is a faucet from which flow streams of slime and trash, corruption, greed, selfishness: the echoes and reverbs paint a confusing and hard-to-grasp world, a blurred swarm in which one can understand the why of individual parts, but not, due to the excessive fragmentation of roles and contexts, the whole sense.

Broadrick's crude and distorted growl is indiscriminately the voice of a worker prisoner on an assembly line, of a white-collar who wears out his eyes in front of a PC, of a finance magnate who measures the world in terms of speculations. It is the silent cry of all those little ants that make up society and find their reason for being in the imperative “produce-consume” (“I shop, therefore I am”). It is the lament and unconscious rage of hordes of the damned rationally distributed in the different infernal/social circles of this world, all serving the same penalty: dehumanization. If in the first half of the album the songs are supported by massive riffs and tight rhythms and, amid one digression and another, manage to maintain a songlike format, at some point something happens, the system goes mad and implodes into itself: the compositions deconstruct and merge with each other, the guitar becomes rarefied, the voices are nullified in agonized screams and disjointed cries for help. It is at this point that the cold beat of the machines becomes the sole guarantor of order in an anarchy of noises and whistles: they, the machines, understood as the System, acquire a spiritual dimension, rise as a new deity (Godflesh) of a world entirely emptied of values and vital/emotional sap, and to them, the entire humanity bends, marching in unison, slave of a mechanism, economic and social, now mad and out of control. Only at times can traces of humanity be found, snippets of desperate decay that will herald the emotional and post-core atmospheres of the Jesu project, the current incarnation of Broadrick's art.

Godflesh doesn’t have the self-satisfaction and commercial appeal of other bands belonging to the same scene, and for this reason, they might not be liked. Godflesh has evident limits, both executive and compositional, and their music is often dispersive and inclusive, full of smudges and lacking that monumental and catastrophic charm that characterizes the works of cousins Scorn. We will hardly come across brilliant songwriting or ingenious finds, and the sparse and essential production certainly doesn’t help. After all, Godflesh are not panderers; their strength lies entirely in descriptive capacity, in the language they forge, in knowing how to express suggestions: often misunderstood by the masses, amid highs and lows, they will continue with coherence and honesty their battle in darkness. But yesterday as today, their message, like their music, remains surprisingly current, and “Streetcleaner”, their first full-length, almost twenty years after its conception, is still a real punch in the teeth.

Godflesh do not represent the discomfort of a generation. Godflesh embody the drama of all humanity. And perhaps that is why they really annoy.