GODFLESH - STREETCLEANER

Album: Streetcleaner
Artist: Godflesh
Year: 1989
Nation: UK (Birmingham, England)
Label: Earache (MOSH15)
Sounds like: A boot stamping on a human face, forever.
Goes best with: Decaying industrial landscapes, Skynet becoming self-aware, being crushed to death by a collapsing skyscraper
Highlights: "Like Rats," "Head Dirt," "Streetcleaner"
Recommended if you're a fan of: Swans, Killing Joke, Throbbing Gristle, Big Black, Whitehouse
Get it: download | vinyl

As much as I adore George Orwell's undisputed masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four, here's what I usually think of when I listen to this album. As a nerd growing up in a small suburb, I had a single close friend that I could always depend upon to have the latest in video game technology. The Video Game Kid tended to smell a bit funny and lack social skills, but that doesn't really matter that much when you're over at his house and have the option of playing on the PlayStation or the Nintendo 64. One pre-sleepover night when we were taken to Blockbuster, that beloved relic of the 90s, I got to pick a game off the shelves. My choice was called MDK, short for Murder Death Kill (oh, to be ten years old again!). Despite the asinine title, it had a fairly unique premise for a video game of the 1990s. You were pitted against a race of aliens called Minecrawlers, extra-terrestrial fortress cities designed to indiscriminately strip-mine planets bare. Upon their arrival on Earth, the major metropolises of our planet were laid to waste along with our forests, mountains, and just about everything else. Resistance against the Minecrawlers in any form was crushed - both figuratively and literally - without even a second thought from the massive machines. We were just another resource to be harvested. Humanity was completely beneath their contempt. We could fight against The Machine all we wanted, but it wouldn't even notice our cries as it ground us into oblivion. On a good day, only 2.5 million people would die.

Godflesh is the best musical expression of The Machine, in all its world-consuming and soul-crushing glory, that I have ever heard. This is the only industrial album that I feel even comes close to the core brutality that the genre demands. Industrial metal is an entirely different beast from the other genres, as animalistic fury and human emotion give way to cold, metallic certainty. There's no Reznorian human empathy behind the mechanical facade or Ministry-trademarked tongue-in-cheek madness to be found here, only a churning behemoth of nihilistic resentment. Justin Broadrick doesn't so much play his guitar as he does attack it, unleashing torturous metallic keenings from the instrument that are made that much more grating by his gold-plated guitar picks. G.C. Green's bass is heavily detuned and played more percussively than melodically, and each note hits like a freight train to the gut. Paul Neville adds even more claustrophobic guitar textures on side 2 of the album, making Godflesh's sound even more colossal. But the real highlight of the album is the drumming, an entirely mechanical dirge-speed march programmed with no attempt to mask its artificiality. Broadrick roars ferociously over the band's lockstep chaos, with the end result being nothing less than pure, grade-A high octane nightmare fuel. More than twenty years have passed since the release of Streetcleaner, and the world still isn't ready for the anti-musical hell that Godflesh has created.

Justin Broadrick certainly knows a bit about hell, both musical and otherwise. He grew up in an English hippie commune in the wake of the 1960s, when all the free-lovers had moved on to harder drugs. His biological father was literally running out of veins to shoot heroin into, and tried to kill Justin on numerous occasions. This was obviously not the best environment for a small child to grow up in, and by his own self-admission Justin has often been wracked by paranoia and fear on many levels for most of his life. So, naturally, he turned to extreme music as an outlet - this is a man who listened to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, an album universally agreed to be unlistenable, repeatedly. At the age of 8. Fuckin' hardcore, man. Along with drumming for industrial rock progenitors Head of David for a stint, Broadrick has helped to invent grindcore itself with Napalm Death on their groundbreaking 1982 debut Scum, transformed hip-hop and dub into something nightmarishly abrasive with Kevin Martin in Techno Animal, and more than successfully merged sludge metal with the ethereal peace of shoegaze in the guise of Jesu. Ever since he first began rocking out on his own with a guitar and a faithful drum machine at the age of 13 in the dilapidated post-industrial wasteland of Birmingham, England (the very cradle of metal itself!), Broadrick has always endeavored to push the envelope of his favorite genres of music, and in turn stretch the limits of what's considered music in the first place. Godflesh's initial incarnation, Fall of Because, was named after a song by proto-industrial legends Killing Joke and inspired by the unrelenting brutality of the early Swans recordings, which are probably the closest that humanity will ever get to successfully replicating the sounds of Hell itself. Godflesh, however, distilled and refined the vitriolic sonic assault of Swans by adding riffs and some semblance of musical structure to the point where you'd actually want to keep listening to it. But by the end of Streetcleaner, it won't make a difference. The Machine will have ground you into the dirt all the same.

The opener "Like Rats" sets the pace, with pulverizing mechanized drumbeats and monstrous riffage, punctuated by the single greatest chorus industrial metal has ever given rise to: "You breed/Like rats." We've all heard the "entire human race is a worthless planet-raping virus headed closer to inevitable self-induced collapse every day" schtick hundreds of times before in heavy metal music, but Godflesh makes it believable - and frighteningly so. This track sounds like the end of the world, and the rest of the album never lets up once. "Christbait Rising" is hailed by many fans as the heaviest track on the album, with good reason, but it's fun to note that Broadrick programmed the drumbeat as an emulation of Eric B. & Rakim's "Microphone Fiend." This makes "Christbait Rising" the only successful merger of metal and hip-hop in history (if you still listen to limp bizkit please kill yourself thanks in advance!!). The jackhammer snares of "Pulp" and the lurching nihilism of "Dream Long Dead" give way to the monstrous "Head Dirt" - at Broadrick's call of "Now feel THIS!", the song collapses under its own immense weight and subsides into a monolithic and punishing guitar drone. This is what it sounds like when you give up all hope. Side 2 picks up with "Devastator," introduced by an anguished Broadrick growl and leading into the climax of the sociopathic "Mighty Trust Krusher" with an escalating intensity freely flourished with samples of spousal abuse and street riots. "Life Is Easy" lets us know that our lives are "money," "profit," "death," and "expendable." "What do you care?" The title track, the highlight of the album and the closer on the vinyl release, is introduced with samples of a serial killer's testimony - yeah, we're not talking about street sweepers here. It crescendos into a hellish maelstrom of mechanical beats, grinding bass, and guitar feedback as Broadrick roars out "THIS FEELS RIGHT." People who think that bands like Slayer are earnestly scary are just those fortunate souls who haven't experienced the sheer terror of Godflesh yet - and for their sake, I hope they never do!

Twenty years later, one needs only to look at the massive tribe of bands swimming in the wake of Godflesh to understand their immense influence on extreme music. The emotional tumult of Neurosis, the epic sprawl of Isis, and the blissed-out drones of Nadja are just a few of the great groups that owe Broadrick, Green, and Neville (and their trusty Alesis-16) a debt they can never repay. Streetcleaner is terrifying, unbearable, horrific, panic-inducing, and completely necessary. Broadrick's vision is one frought with fear and paranoia, along with the mission of bringing that ultimate fear to others - this is a man who watched Alien and sympathized with the extraterrestrial horror. "Sometimes I'm scared of my own thoughts, the things I fantasize about doing," Justin admitted in a 1992 interview after the release of Godflesh's second LP, Pure. "Thank God I'm not killing people for therapy."

BUY OR DIE.
<3 sam

PS: You can still buy MDK on Steam. It's only $10 and the gameplay's still loads of fun.