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Everyday I Get Closer To The Light From Which I Came = Digipack = (CD)
There are two bands called Jesu. One is a bedroom project that mostly makes minimalist, experimental, drum-machine-backed EPs and split singles. The other is a full rock band that makes full rock albums, with drums provided by former Swans, Prong, and Godflesh member Ted Parsons. Both are led by Justin Broadrick-- co-founder of Napalm Death and Godflesh, as well as numerous side projects. What ties both versions of Jesu together is Broadrick's wide-angle vision: a melodic yet abstracted amalgam of industrialized metal and time-lapse shoegaze. Until now it's been pretty easy to know which Jesu you were getting, simply by noting if the release in question were an EP or an album. But on Jesu's fifth full-length, Everyday I Get Closer to the Light From Which I Came, that distinction is not so strict. Neither is Broadrick's normally high standard. Clocking in at five songs, Everyday I Get Closer is the skimpiest Jesu full-length to date (not counting the single-cut, fifty-minute Infinity from 2009, which is neither EP fish nor album fowl). The tracks vary greatly in span, but beyond that there's not as much of a dynamic as on prior Jesu full-lengths. Granted, Jesu has long been one of those great, every-song-sounds-the-same kind of endeavors, although a deeper immersion in any given Jesu disc reveals rich degrees of emotional engagement and layers of textured ambience. On top of that, Broadrick has been turning into a stunning singer-songwriter, a kind of British Mark Eitzel buried under metric tons of celestial distortion. Few of these strengths are in abundance on Everyday I Get Closer. On "Homesick", Broadrick's trademark use of descending chord progressions is executed in his sleep, as is the Swervedriver-ish swirl and chiming counterpoint. There's an afterimage of longing that haunts the song, but it never clicks into focus. Nor does the 17-minute, would-be saga that is "The Great Leveller", which drifts from movement to movement-- piano-laced intro, planetoid riffs, antigravity interludes, the low-cycle hum of synthesized melancholy-- in an anticlimactic meander.
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Similar artists: GODFLESH, JUNIUS
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