Twenty-one years after its original release, Godflesh's first full-length album, Streetcleaner, has been reissued in a deluxe two-disc edition that features both a remastered version of the original album and plenty of extras for fans to sink their teeth into. Rehearsal demos, live tracks, and early mixes fill the second disc and showcase the creative process that led Godflesh to the groundbreaking sound they created on Streetcleaner, a sound that has been a direct influence on everything from the metal/industrial hybrid bands of the early 90s (Pigface, Ministry) to the modern wave of ambient post-metal groups (Isis, Mastodon).
When appraising the early years of Earache Records, Godflesh's Streetcleaner seems a much more adult album than the more standard examples of death metal and grindcore released by that label in the late 80s. And indeed, Godflesh founder Justin Broadrick had been playing music professionally for several years before even starting Godflesh. However, this knowledge is deceiving in light of the fact that Broadrick's recording career began in his early teens. When he played guitar on Napalm Death's Scum, he was 16 years old. After leaving that band, he spent a few years playing drums in Head Of David, whose blending of industrial and metal influences pointed Broadrick in the direction he would eventually take with Godflesh. The sound he and Godflesh co-founder G.C. Green created for Streetcleaner was a mature and fully realized version of Broadrick's previous musical explorations, including those undertaken by his previous project with Green, Fall Of Because. And yet, when Justin Broadrick recorded Streetcleaner, he was still only 20 years old.
Regardless of whether or not fans of the album would like to admit it, Streetcleaner is heavily informed by post-teenage angst. Part of the reason this idea seems so shameful to us now is that so many bands have come along in the intervening years and made teen angst sound overtly self-pitying, solipsistic and, well, a bit silly. Fortunately, Broadrick is never silly at any point on Streetcleaner, instead channeling a darkness and anger that is always sinister and sometimes outright terrifying. On opening track "Like Rats," Broadrick runs his voice through a distorting vocal effect and screams the phrase "you bleed like rats" over and over in his lowest register. His scorn here is being vented upon the society that he sees around him, and in the next song, "Christbait Rising," he expresses just as strong a contempt for the forces of organized religion. "Christbait rising, bleed dry mankind," he screams, voice no longer distorted and not quite the growl that was standard for Earache artists of the time, but still deep, a sinister echoing presence throughout the song.
Musically, Godflesh provides a soundtrack perfectly suited to the expression of these antisocial feelings, and that is especially true on what is perhaps the album's most overtly antisocial song, "Pulp." Here, Broadrick's hatred for society is merely a background emotion. The song's focus is a celebration of separation; "When on my own, I feel free," Broadrick screams. "I can refuse." Underneath these screams is the implacable pounding of the band's drum machine, programmed by Broadrick himself to hammer unchanging, unrelenting slabs of simulated percussion into the listener's head. While bassist G.C. Green's distorted pound is just as forceful as the drum machine's programmed beats, both his bass and Broadrick's guitar are drowned out to an extent by the drum machine's placement at the forefront of the mix. It's as if Godflesh is punishing anyone who dares to listen to them, giving the highest priority to the harshest elements of their sound. In this way, they are reminiscent of the Swans, an early 80s New York noise outfit, contemporaries of Sonic Youth, whose first few albums were endurance tests of the first order. The Swans and Godflesh shared both a sonic harshness and their slow, dragging tempos, but where The Swans would submerge the production, on early albums like Filth, in masses of midrange mud that made most instruments indistinguishable, Streetcleaner features a clarity that is just as punishing in its own right. The remastering job only increases the velocity with which the high accents of the drum machine beats hiss harshly into the listener's ears.
The punishing aspects of Godflesh's sound are even clearer on the original mixes that appear on the second disc of this reissue. If the machine rhythm seems to occupy the foreground of the final, released mix of the album, then it positively overpowers the original mixes, in which the guitars are an ambient distorted buzz in the background, individual notes all but indistinguishable. These drum-and-vocal mixes are much closer to the forbidding industrial/noise roots of Godflesh's music, and many listeners who embraced the released version of Streetcleaner may have been repelled by these pounding, staccato slabs of machine-fueled screaming. These mixes may have been purer forms of Broadrick and Godflesh's original vision, but it's probably good that they didn't decide to release them this way at the time, as they may have scared off many of the listeners who instead made Streetcleaner such an influential album.
The two live tracks that follow the original mixes on the second disc, by contrast, focus on the more human element of Godflesh's sound. Without studio effects to hide behind, the emotion in Broadrick's voice is far clearer, and even on "Streetcleaner," on which he uses the same distorting vocal effect he used on "Like Rats," he sounds upset, freaked out by the very words he's singing. On the song's studio version, a sample of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas begins the song: "I didn't hear voices. It was a conscious decision on my part. I acted on my fantasies." To hear Broadrick, through a truly frightening vocal effect, respond to this sample by growling "Vision. This feels right," only increases the song's terrifying atmosphere. And yet, on the live version, he can't hide behind an effect that makes him sound like the devil in a bad 80s horror movie, and at the end of the song, as he repeats "We all die," and then screams incoherently, another feeling comes through. Here, Broadrick is not just inciting terror, he is succumbing to it. In so doing, he makes clear that he himself is just as terrified by "Streetcleaner"'s nightmarish visions as he intends the listener to be.
Perhaps the most enlightening moment of this entire reissue comes at the end of the second disc, where we find a group of lo-fi rehearsal demos. One of these is a 12-minute version of "Pulp," extending what became a relatively concise song in its final form to three times the length it possessed on Streetcleaner. As G.C. Green and the imperturbable Machine pound endlessly away at the song's basic riff, Broadrick fills the room with distortion, feedback squeals, and unintelligible screams, sometimes ceasing to play guitar completely in favor of an extended vocal rant. This rehearsal disproves, if they even needed disproving, any accusations--made somewhat frequently at the time of Streetcleaner's original release--that Godflesh's music, by nature of its incorporation of a drum machine, was clinical and dispassionate. This is Godflesh plumbing the lowest depths of their dark, pounding sound, exposing the essential humanity that the skeletal framework of machinery can never completely hide. Later in this epic rendition, after Broadrick has exhausted himself vocally, he spends several moments in guitar-based meditation, alternating between contorted tremolo variations on single notes stretched to their limits, and extended bouts of grinding rhythm guitar, generating sonic walls of single-chord self-hypnosis. This version of "Pulp" is the entire two-disc reissue's beating heart--and it sounds terrible, like the demo recordings you get when you stick an old boombox in the corner of your band's rehearsal room. But this is sublime, somehow perfect, because for Godflesh, it was always about stripping away the sonic layers, exposing the less polished parts of the music, until only the ugly truth remained. And then, in that ugliness, somehow, finding beauty, finding catharsis, finding a reason to carry on.
In current project Jesu, Justin Broadrick has found a way to take loud, heavy monotony and make it beautiful. Twenty years ago, in Godflesh, he was taking a slightly easier path--the path towards making loud, heavy monotony feel bleak and ugly and utterly without hope. But what both projects have in common is their hypnotic power, which allows them to pull the listener into the headspace they are creating and shut a metaphorical door behind them. When Streetcleaner is on the stereo, you feel powerless to ignore it. Maybe it seems counterintuitive to reach for the darkest slabs of noise at the worst moments; I'm sure there are some out there who will never understand the appeal for a depressed person of their Smiths (or Swans) records. But for those who know what it is to struggle through loss of dignity and personal pride, long dark nights of all-encompassing solitude, those crisis points in which one seriously contemplates whether it'd be better to give up and walk away from everything familiar and try again somewhere else--Streetcleaner will speak quite clearly. Its specific words are not really that important, either--only that it clearly speaks from familiar terrain. In that, some may find comfort. Maybe that's all we can ask for.
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Godflesh's Streetcleaner Redux Edition was released on August 10 by Earache Records and can be ordered here.