Despite being billed as a “mini album” and featuring a mere two tracks, Jesu’s debut release actually clocks in at a whopping 40 minutes – time enough for Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Head of David, God etc.) to set down a stunning statement of intent and show the young bucks paying homage to his former glories a trick or two.
Godflesh fans will be delighted to hear Broadrick’s almighty guitar tone intact and more than capable of shaking the fillings from your teeth, plodding grudgingly to the sickeningly steady beat of some relentless mechanical taskmaster that reduces human lives to little more than grist for the infernal mill. However, before the notion of some kind of Selfless-era resurrection can secure its roots the grim industrial dirge blossoms into a more peaceful entity entirely, temporarily laying the thunder to rest and replacing it with layer upon layer of carefully-crafted ambience, reaching for majestic celestial peaks just as hungrily as the bludgeoning riffs sought solace in the depths of an anonymous grave. The reverential tone of the music is rounded off by Broadrick’s gloomy, multilayered vocals, a solemnly chanted canticle that may have been better suited to echoing down the corridors of some cold, stone place of worship than the confines of a crick-necked headbanger’s bedroom, but what the hell – when music is this sorrowful and sublime the result can be just as holy.