.::SCRATCHtheSurface Webzine::.: Craig Hayes

Justin Broadrick has released an abundance of fascinating music over his long career. From his earliest days with Napalm Death and Godflesh, through to Jesu and a raft of other projects and productions, he's been hugely influential in reshaping the boundaries of underground music. That said, with so many different artistic personas, some of Broadrick's releases have felt like preliminary drafts, and in the case of Jesu, that's meant predictable techniques have led to some formulaic releases.

Broadrick will tell you the same. In a recent interview with website Metal Sucks he noted that he wished he could have gone a lot further with Jesu's past few releases. However, with the revival of Godflesh – the yin to Jesu's yang – Broadrick has been able to concentrate on exactly what Jesu stands for on its latest release, Everyday I Get Closer to the Light from Which I Came.

The album has benefited enormously from Broadrick's refocus. It contains an exquisite balance of woozy shoegaze and bright bursts of expansive post-rock. It reaches back to Jesu's earliest years, touches on many elements explored since, and still finds room to sound fresh. Broadrick's handling of dynamics and textures is the key here, and he deftly combines the expected while still pushing forward creatively.

Opener "Homesick" sees distortion and delicacy meet, and "Comforter" and "Grey Is the Colour" mix waves of reverb, crushing instrumentation, and skewed electronica with sombre passages of reflection. Of course, none of those elements are new, but what makes Everyday I Get Closer... such a sublime release is that it's a sincere reflection of Broadrick's current state of mind.

He isn't banging his head against the walls of Birmingham squats anymore, he's a 44 year old living in South Wales, and he became a father around the time of the album's creation. As the title of the album's 17-minute centerpiece "The Great Leveller" suggests, that's brought some understandable changes to Broadrick's artistic vision.

The song is not only one of Jesu's greatest ever, but it's a gorgeous reflection of that change. My Bloody Valentine by way of Neurosis churns collide on "The Great Leveller". Marital percussion arises, symphonic strings sweep in, and it all ends on lullaby piano. The track cuts density with ambience, and heaviness with etherealness, but most of all, it broadens Jesu's sonic range while holding fast to a core sense of intimacy. "The Great Leveller" underscores exactly why Everyday I Get Closer... is such an affecting album overall. It perfectly captures the feel of an artist moving forward in life, and the album as a whole maintains that personal honesty throughout.

In a world drowning in greed, lies, and selfishness, immersing yourself in the heartfelt and consoling tides of Everyday I Get Closer... is the ideal elixir. Kudos to Broadrick for providing us with such.

Craig Hayes

Band info: www.facebook.com/Justin-K-Broadrick
Label info: www.avalancheinc.co.uk

Craig Hayes is music writer based in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a contributing editor, reviewer, and writes a monthly metal column at North American site PopMatters. He contributes loud words elsewhere around the web, on sites such as Metal Bandcamp and Backlit, and at home in NZ, he is a freelance writer and radio producer. Craig favours sounds from the metal, experimental and noise scenes, and has a crippling love of Krautrock, vintage progressive rock, and proto-metal too. You can find Craig losing followers daily on twitter @sixnoises

Like many of metal's underground forebears, it's thanks to the internet that cult Finnish death metal band Convulse's reputation has increased dramatically since its original demise in 1994. With fans rediscovering the band's bestial debut, 1992's World Without God – along with a well-deserved reissue of the album by label Relapse in 2010 – Convulse finds itself in the position of being more respected than ever.

It's no surprise then to find the band back in action. Original members Rami Jämsä (guitars and vocals) and Juha Telenius (bass) were joined by a couple of new recruits for live dates in 2012, and the band released the two-song Inner Evil EP in January this year. Now, close to two decades since it last released an album, Convulse is set to return with a new full-length, Evil Prevails. The album is heavy on the macabre musical atmospherics and lyrical savagery, and brings plenty of old-school Scandinavian pummel. Nothing surprising in that, of course; no one expected Convulse to return with an album replete with über-technical wonderments.

Vintage brutality and the stench of 90s butchery is expected, and that's exactly what's delivered. Gut-punch lurches of grinding riffs, thrash-worthy soloing, and cavernous vocals play out over blast-beaten terrain on tracks like "We Kill Our Kind" and "Reborn in Chaos". Gentler acoustics feature on "Unholy War" and "God is Delusion", and "Oceans of Dust" and "Days Are Dark" make space for doomier, groove-heavy rampages too.

Evil Prevails might well signal Convulse's full resurrection, but there's little evidence of any maturing or progression, as such. Still, that's no bad thing. Jämsä's growls are as throat-scouring as they ever were, the guitars are downtuned to fittingly gruesome degrees, and the album's production is certainly the band's best yet – all dank and dark analog annihilation, with a black metal rawness in its tremolo-ripping parts.

The songs themselves feature gritty harmonizing and plenty of skewed melodies plucked straight from the 90's, and while that means Evil Prevails isn't innovative whatsoever, you can safely mark it down as an album that doesn't tarnish Convulse's reputation in the least. It's a firm reminder that no school is keener on dispensing lessons in auditory violence like the old one.

Craig Hayes

Band info: www.facebook.com/Convulse
Label info: www.svartrecords.com