What feels like a lifetime ago, I was a college radio DJ. I'd already been manically ranting for years about music I liked to anyone who'd stand still, so when I had an opportunity to get my own show on Knox College's radio station, WVKC, I didn't even think twice. It was hard, exhausting work (largely because my fringe tastes and quixotic attempts to expose a small liberal arts campus in Illinois to stuff that was pretty far out guaranteed me a late-night slot), but it was extremely rewarding too. In a lot of ways, it signaled my awakening as a full-blown music obsessive: having access to the piles of new releases sent to WVKC exposed me to an ever-enlarging pool of music, and I listened to everything new and interesting I could get my hands on with determined intensity. I'm still proud of some of the shows I produced back then, even though they were only heard by a handful of my friends (at best).

One of my first favorites I discovered through WVKC was Godflesh's American debut, Streetcleaner. Without that album and the first Carcass album, I don't think I would have ever gotten into heavy metal the way I have. It's hard to imagine my present-day life without metal, because as broad as my tastes are, metal, techno, and indie rock are the three axes around which the rest of my musical interests revolve. The style of metal Godflesh defined on that first album is at the core of what I love about metal now: precise, heavy, chilly, and at least a little misanthropic. They were the first band to translate the nihilistic, null-point ethos of noise-rock pioneers Swans into metal, or at least to do it well. Streetcleaner hasn't aged a day (to my ears), and, like My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, has stayed endlessly listenable despite having been endlessly imitated and copied (by Neurosis, Cult of Luna, and Isis among others).

The thing I love most about Godflesh's early albums is the wistfulness that hangs around the edges of their music. They're sung more in sorrow than in anger—even though Justin's barking out his vocals in a barely-restrained scream, they're run through enough reverb, delay, and compression that their aggressive edge is blunted. Similarly, the way the band used heavy, downtuned chords and dubbed-out clouds of harmonically-enhanced feedback gave their music a melancholic edge that worked against the anger of the rest of their songs. It placed their music in an interstitial space somewhere between industrial, goth, and metal, and it made their songs stand alone. I always kind of wished they'd push the melodic side of their sound further, because I've always found the combination of total heaviness and melody irresistable.

A few years ago, a no-hit shoegazer band, Nemo, put out a song called "Hyperdrive". It was a remarkable song by an otherwise unremarkable band that coupled a strong affinity for indie pop with a heavy low end and downtuned metal guitars. I must have listened to that song hundreds of times over a couple months, and I was frustrated by the complete inadequacy of the rest of Nemo's songs. They'd gotten it right that once; why couldn't they do it some more?

To put this all together, Justin Broadrick (after dissolving Godflesh in 2002) has done exactly that with his new project, Jesu. Jesu's self-titled debut album on Hydra Head forms a single, massive cathedral of sound. It is the heaviest album I have heard since Cult of Luna's Salvation or Isis's Panopticon, only instead of the metalcore alternation of gruff and sung vocals of Isis and Cult of Luna, Jesu features Broadrick's melancholic, clean tenor, sometimes multi-tracked into harmonies and nearly obliterated behind a wall of reverb and delay. The music moves slowly and tracks shift and change incrementally, the lyrics are introspective and exhausted, and the album feels more like the downer pop of Ben Harper, Coldplay, Sigur Rós or Mazzy Star than anything in the metal realm. The drums are slow-motion and martial (Ted Parsons, who has drummed for Swans, Godflesh, Prong, and Killing Joke, among many others, plays on the album) and it's impossible to distinguish the guitars and bass most of the time, united as they are in gigantic, uncarved blocks of fifth-chord harmony. It's heavy enough to be doom metal, pretty enough to be shoegazer, and sad enough to be emo.

I first heard the promo for this record, which is released on January 25th, when I was engaging in a little consumer therapy at Amoeba Records in SF. I'd been listening for about 30 seconds when I decided I liked what I was hearing, about a minute when I wondered what something this heavy was doing being played in the DVD room, and about two minutes before I absolutely needed to know what it was. I stayed in the room until the album finished playing, nearly an hour later, just because I couldn't force myself to walk out. I was in a somewhat strange, strained emotional state to begin with, but even so, what I was hearing was so powerful that it was making me want to cry, in the best possible way. I was completely unsurprised to discover that Justin Broadrick was involved, and happy to see that it was being released on Hydra Head—as the friendly guy who showed me the CD said, "There'd be no Hydra Head without Justin Broadrick."

I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that nothing this upcoming year is going to best its amazingly effective marriage of metal heaviness and pop melody. This is an album tailor-made for me here and now—it unites nostalgia with the present, it's religious in its intensity, it's sad, and it's really fucking heavy. It's going to take something pretty amazing to trump it, much as nothing was able to beat Circle Takes the Square's As The Roots Undo, which I knew was probably 2004's album of the year when I heard it for the first time last February. If you have any interest in old shoegazer bands like Slowdive or My Bloody Valentine, if you ever heard a Mogwai or Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Sigur Rós song and liked it, if you like Neurosis or Isis or Halo, you owe it to yourself to give this a listen. It's brilliant, beautiful, and almost wise.

don't forget who introduced you to Nemo! That song is amazing. I don't know Godflesh, but I certainly will be getting Jesu. sounds perfect.

godflesh and helmet were also my musical touchstones for precision, heaviness, and ambience. but helmet soiled their legacy through increasing mediocrity, while godflesh kept standards high. so i'm real excited to hear jesu. and i hope to run into you someday. fellow people who have metal and techno as musical axes don't grow on trees.

i totally agree with the GF as paradigm shift. swans was also like that for me, but they went all over the place, experimenting and such!
the new jesu album is indeed incredible. the ep is also good::: dryrun.net
there's a band on tzadik called kayo dot who are earth-shakingly compelling live. 9 people in the band, with regular rock instruments coupled with some strings and brass. their cd "choirs of the eye" has gorgeous elements, unsettling elements, even a few drops of metal here and there (some members formerly of prog-metal band maudlin of the well). from some of the bands you list, i think you should check them out! my fav track by them is the manifold curiosity. when they close with it live it leaves you speechless!

Right on! Thanks for the comments, you two!

Wendell, I already have the Jesu EP, and I like it a lot, although it's really more like Godflesh than the Jesu full-length. It's funny, there's a place in the second track where you can hear the loop point, and after listening to the looped guitar track a few times, I'm almost certain that chunk of guitar is taken from something on Godflesh's Pure. Not that it makes it any less worthwhile, but it does show how schematic the EP can be.

I will definitely see what I can find by kayo dot, although it sounds like they may be better live than on record. That kind of post-rock prog heaviosity has serious traction with me indeed.

cosmo, you're right that metal/technoheads are an uncommon dual class, but San Francisco seems to have more of them than most places. I remember having many long, impassioned conversations about Emperor and Slayer and Darkthrone with reACH back in the day—this is the same guy who used to drop Ministry's "Stigmata" into jungle sets, a trick that still seems breathtaking in its simplicity and elegance even now. And while I haven't been going out much lately, that will probably change. Keep an eye on my blog and we might run into one another. I'd watch your blog, but apparently you're done with it.