GODFLESH on Inferno Magazine, October 2014 issue

Justin, now that Godflesh is back is it heavier than ever?
- Uhh, I don’t know. You think so? Oh, you do. You must be right, heh heh! It’s kind of strange that after so many years we feel heavy, surely heavier than before.

The comeback of Godflesh is welcomed, especially along the strong album. Reasons for burying the band included the department of GC Green in 2001, Broadrick’s nervous breakdown and cancellation of the following US tour in 2002 and debt. Going back to the grind understandably didn’t feel worth trying for many years. Whether they rediscovered the pain, anger and angst in their guts, we don’t know.
- I don’t think it ever faded. Godflesh had to dissolve, and actually it already happened late 2001, because in 2002 we didn’t play a single gig. We couldn’t imagine playing as Godflesh evermore. We still stayed friends but we went in different directions: I did other kind of music and Ben returned to university, got himself a high profile profession and married. Godflesh was invited to several metal fests for years. I didn’t even inquire Ben if he was interested. Gradually I started feeling I’d like to make aggressive and explosive music. I did start a couple of projects like that, Greymachine and JK Flesh. Sometime in 2009 I got how great it would be to do Godflesh again. I didn’t believe Ben would be interested in resurrecting the band, but good festivals were on the offering, so I asked afterall. Suddenly, at first hand he answered that yeah, of course. The new album is so fierce thanks to the break. When we were on our different paths we achieved a clear desire to create an album like this. It became apparent that Godflesh has to be this linear lifeform. On the three previous albums the band was in sort of a crisis. By my own definition we broke boundaries too much. Sure Godflesh is kind of an experimental band, but we went overly far. I love the simplicity of Godflesh, and now we have returned to the core of the sound. I bring this sound that even I have hard to put into words. In a way it’s impossible to write down articulately. It has its own language.

The band’s collection In All Languages got its name from this very same observation: the indoctrination of Godflesh grasps deeply, even if you didn’t understand jack shit of the lyrics. It works in all languages. The band has gigged actively since 2010. Since the beginning, it’s been clear to Broadrick that there would be new output to come. Songs were born, but confusingly, the EP recorded in the same sessions as the LP is quite different.
- It was kind of intentional. We wanted the album to be a coherent monolith. On the EP we wanted to sound more dynamic and vary the output more. The EP might be a bit misleading. But it’s a colorful appetizer, and the album was meant to be the main dish, a ruthless steak, heh heh.

Decline & Fall surely did confuse, and based on it you couldn’t expect such a strong and streamlined album. EPs, Broadrick’s favorite format, have space for experimenting. There's no need to commit to them as much as on albums.

FOR MIND AND BODY
Even though Godflesh in 2014 is precisely the same type of a roller as in 1989, it’s quite different at the same time.
- I believe the band has a recognizable sound. It’s characteristic to us. We show our influences clearly, but we still have shaped a texture that’s identifiable in Godflesh’s tone. For us this sound is timeless, and the new album would sound the same even if we did it five years later. We really wanted to do this album, and I think it’s our best album in 20 years. The album clearly reflects the original Godflesh concept. The difference to old material can be found in the more modern and clear production – and now I use an eight string guitar instead of a down tuned six string!

Broadrick describes the expression of Godflesh as textual and unprogressive, ultimately heavy metal reduced to the core. The front man’s listed influences from early industrial and heavy to hardcore, noise rock and post-punk were heard in the tone on the debut Streetcleaner – and can still be heard. Godflesh is still a brutal, aggressive an attacking tank, but the lead-heavy fisting and repetitive wall of distortion is refined so that the expression strangely appeals to the mind as well. Broadrick’s analysis drills deep, and the man’s thoughts sound like as if he considered his band as an external expert.
- When people think of brutal music, death metal and that kind of stuff pops into mind. Sure there’s a lot of metal in this album, but it’s in a reduced minimal form. The filth and dirt typical to Godflesh shows more accurately and the big picture is scathing and harrowing. For me this is body music, but also head music. In my view it’s meant to be both, in other words to get the listener to think as well. For me Godflesh still feels challenging. We always felt creating outsider music, and we never felt fitting in any pigeonhole.

Change, small or big, gets its strength from something. Now change to the sound of Godflesh was brought from Broadrick’s years in other projects. Perspective changes by age - and understanding that bringing all your characteristics into one project is unnecessary – were one substantial reason to the returning. However the change that Godflesh downright searched for before its collapsing was too much in the end and the band drifted into a dead end. There were human drummers, samplers and dub and breakbeat influences. To my ears the expression was interesting and particularly high-class in places, but no more consistent to the original principles.

GODLIKE MACHINE
As noted, Godflesh returned to the crucial articles its rulebook live as on record. The pile of influences listed earlier essentially grows, when you take Broadrick’s and Green’s common, surprising and confusing “obsession”.
- We’ve always been big fans of mid-80s hip hop. The idea of using drum machines in our music comes from that. It’s odd and some people do think that whatthehell. The machine is precise and sounds really robust. I always wanted to study expression without a physical drummer, even though I love drums! For me, Godflesh is about rhythm, that’s just reproduced with guitar and bass. We lock into the beat of the drum machine and speak rhythm language with string instruments.

Broadrick brightly understands how a drum machine can cause a love-hate-relationship in the listener, which sure is one fascinating element of the band. Broadrick himself has played drums on a few albums, and he made a decision to use a machine when starting up the band. Despite his “only average drumming skills” he could’ve played them, but the machine does it more massively and accurately. And he wanted to play the guitar. Through the drum machine the band’s expression certainly gets mystic power and crushing precision. Drummers can sometimes be in bad shape for drumming, but the same kand happen to a rhythm machine. The greatest example of such is from 1991, when Godflesh went touring the States with Napalm Death.
- The first gig of the round was on Rhode Island. We were already amused by the fact that the speaker presented us by roaring “now Godflesh, the gods of industrial metal, yeeeeeeaah!” The crowd bellowed excitedly and the atmosphere was totally different than in Europe. We climbed on stage and began to prepare. At that time we didn’t have a foot switch on the machine, so GC was hunkering to press the play button. He pressed it and all you could hear was “brrrt”. Like a wet fart and little smoke! That was it, our first gig in America. We didn’t play a single note! If a drum machine fries on stage, you’d want it to at least explode spectacularly and maybe even destroy half the stage. But it was just a miserable fart. The reason of course was wrong voltage. In the morning we acquired a new drum machine, and I spent the whole bus trip to Boston by reeling the Streetcleaner cassette back and forth and programming the whole album’s drum tracks in the machine.

SCENES, GENERATIONS AND INFLUENCES
When Godflesh’s debut Streetcleaner was listened to in the death metal times, the band was crammed into the same pen, thanks to the roared songs and super-rough riff-blasting. Nevertheless, the band got followers that imitated it more or less directly. Perhaps one of the most direct homages to Godflesh was the domestic Dogmeat, whose demos never reached Broadrick’s ears.
- I was aware of quite many of these groups. Some bands had my friends in them. Half of Optimum Wound Profile was folk from Extreme Noise Terror, who I knew from Napalm Death times. And I think early Pitch Shifter albums were quite swell. They had an aggressive and maximal take, that kind of godflesh-like, heh heh. They had good stuff, a really disorderly thing going on too, before it shaped into a different kind of band. It’s sure is quite strange, but that’s how it goes. For example, let’s think that Discharge is a cornerstone to a zillion hardcore bands. Even today new bands sounding like Discharge pop up. It’s some kind of a syndrome. Some in the hc punk scene have an interesting sound, which stems from many different sources, and others start embracing it. Even our roots are in hardcore, but we made our own mixture of it, that then became some kind of a formula for this kind of music. Some copy straight, some develop their own vision from it, which is great. This thing is well known in the metal scene too. We’ll see if there’ll be more of these pattern repeaters in the future. New generations will be exposed to the crushing Godflesh regardless. When we returned to the stages, somehow we expected playing only to an audience of our age group. Godflesh is quite a bit of a generation experience, which is a bit strange. Anyway we’ve noticed that especially on festivals, there’s the same amount of youngsters as people of my age. It’s really interesting to see, will twenty-year-olds of start projects that sound like Godflesh of today. If younger bands adopt our sound, I’d believe it’d be more of a fusion of something else too. You can imagine that twenty-year-olds don’t have the nerve to keep the thing as primitive. All sorts of trite synths and nagging, or something even worse. Yeah, and in the middle of everything a really out-of-line guitar solo, heh heh. There’s not even a single element that would resemble a solo on our new album, but that’s not what’s Godflesh is about, not at all. Even though we have this new popularity, there’s still a lot of folk that have big problems with Godflesh. The band is still rather challenging. People still perceive this music as pretty belligerent.

Broadrick has operated amidst marginal music that few young people have listened to. When new and old generations meet thanks to the visibility of Godflesh, it creates astonishment on both sides.
- I’ve read comments where youngsters utterly fail to get that the band’s idea is its sheer heaviness. Some might question repetitiveness… it’s just boring… Our group’s idea clearly goes over their heads. We feel to live in a time where aggressive music is in. Technical skills are perceived as precious - what they surely are, but not in our music.

A clear intersection can be found in Meshuggah, who rely on repetitiviness and rhythm. Like Godflesh it’s extremely heavy, ruthless and crushing, but at the same time it’s a very different kind of band.
- Yeah, I love Meshuggah. They have the same kind of weight and texture. The big difference is of course in technicality and progressiveness. We don’t have a bit of either. Funny, when someone played Meshuggah to me for the first time, he did it based on it sounding like Godflesh. I was thrilled immediately and I noticed the same idea in their core. It had similar kind of dirt, filth and monolithic heaviness. It’s strongly body music, but also clearly head music. Maybe the emphasis of mind and body is opposite as Godflesh, but nevertheless it’s an unbelievable band.

Meshuggah have also used machine drums in their output…
- Yeah, and that coincidence. It’s quite funny also heard they’ve got influence from us. On the other hand they’ve also been inspired by Fear Factory, which is a band influenced by Godflesh. Odd, odd…

FROM ANOTHER STATE OF MIND
Broadrick is honestly surprised when I praise the excellence of the new Jesu album. He is taken aback by my observation of Godflesh’s sound sneaking into the tone of Jesu in a certain kind of harshness. And a drum machine whacking on the album too.
- That’s interesting, probably no one has said it’s reminiscent of Godflesh. But maybe this kind of similarities can be found. For me Jesu and Godflesh will differ from each other even more than before in the future. The next Jesu album will probably be even softer, although something like what you mentioned. I think that bands need to be different clearly from each other.

So friends of Broadrick’s more ethereal output need not fear that Jesu would blend with Godflesh or cease to exist. The next Jesu album Broadrick will start making perhaps late this year already.
- Both projects are important to me. With these I can express my creativity rather satisfyingly. I’m happy about the existence of both, it’s quite a stroke of luck to be honest. Jesu is is more serene and introspective, a lot more melancholic and definite. But in the same manner Godflesh is melancholic but depressing and actually quite sad to me, heh heh.

In fact, a lot of melancholy can be found in the timbre of Godflesh, but it’s manifested in an extremely violent form.
- Precisely. Jesu hasn’t got this violent aspect at all, essentially not at all of this same aggression.

Although on the first Jesu album and on the Heart Ache EP, the ghost of Godflesh was still haunting.
- In any case Jesu is going to an even more introverted direction, wider and more cinematic than before. Simultaneously Godflesh drifts into a more minimalistic and simple mold.

On this basis, the cycle evolution won’t restart, in other words live drummers, breakbeats or – good heavens – dubstep influences won’t find their way into Godflesh.
- No, only the pounding of the drum machine, heh heh!