Year Of Metal #089: Godflesh - Purge
While the likes of Toxic Holocaust and Cryptopsy have proudly offered up exactly what it says on the tin, here we have a metal band whose rather gruesome name belies far more intricate and interesting music. Before doing any reading, I was absolutely expecting something in the death vein from Birmingham’s Godflesh. Instead I received one of the most interesting, cathartic, and shockingly groovy records I’ve heard to date.
Operating since the late ‘80s, Godflesh turn out to be serious players in a genre I know very little about: industrial (though they seem to shrink from such labelling, taking inspiration from noise rock and post punk, which adds up). Like all styles of music, there’s industrial and then there’s industrial, with Nine Inch Nails on one side and Einstürzende Neubauten (maybe - that’s as extreme as I’ve ever gone, anyway) on the other. Godflesh are somewhere in the middle, with this album at least (I understand this is one of their more accessible). They aren’t fucking around on 2023’s Purge - this is a grinding, grunting record that has its light and shade but never really lets up. Its title refers to the therapeutic use Justin Broadrick gets from heavy music in living with his PTSD and autism.
And yet, if you found yourself in the right club (a pretty weird club, like that one in the Matrix sequels maybe), you could imagine yourself dancing to this stuff! A lot of it comes from the drum machine percussion section, which is thumping and pounding but often with a toe tapping shuffle to it. I’m thinking particularly of “Army Of Non”, where the skipping, syncopated beat meshes so nicely with Broadrick’s insistent, unerring, bendy guitar parts. It’s still absolutely industrial - every edge is sharpened and machinelike - but you can’t help move to it.
I’m taken with the grinding sound from the off. Again there’s that mechanoid quality on opener “Nero”, everything kicking into gear all at once, no fade, no warm ups, just this grizzly noise coming at you. The only human quality comes from Broadrick’s voice, and he does the best he can to shed it of any warmth. He positively roars across this album, often multi tracked and pushing the sound way into the red. The indecipherable nature of his vocals are quite the point - he’s created the abyss, and now he’s howling into it.
Godflesh give us the closest they get to a moment of light on “Permission”, a track with such a danceable beat that it could be a Prodigy song. Bassist Ben Green comes into his own here, thwacking the strings to keep a rhythm going over the shrieks and clangs of barbed wire guitars. For all that this is a genuinely great dance beat, the Purge of the record is always present - this is anxiety-inducing stuff. You keep moving to stop your brain from eating itself.
The fun’s over after this, as the final third of the LP gets into genuinely malignant stuff. While there’s not a great deal of melody to strip out, what little there is gets jettisoned by the time we hit “Mythology Of Self”. They never rely on punishing the listener with the sheer harshness of their sounds, instead creating an ominous mood by subtler means. Everything slows down, and strips down, the skittering drum patterns replaced by lonely, desperate snare thwacks. In the distance, tom hits sound like a prisoner battering desperately at a door. In nightmarish fashion, this too is stripped away, and we’re left alone with just the feedback for company.
I really thought this was fantastic, not at all what I expected going in, and I’d conceivably like to investigate industrial music further as a result, though I imagine I could be put off that pursuit pretty quickly. I’ll certainly give their debut Streetcleaner a go, though from everything I’ve read about it so far, I’m genuinely frightened of it.
