When Conqueror dropped in 2007, it was easy to think Justin Broadrick had perfected Jesu's aesthetic. Conquerer expanded the band's shoegaze-meets-doom sound, making it brighter and more colorful, while scaling back on the pound-you-down heaviness of earlier releases. It crossed over from the "extreme" ghetto because it was so versatile. You could drift out on it, as if it was a gorgeous ambient record with really heavy downbeats, or you could bang your head.
Since 2007, Broadrick has busied himself with side projects and a string of Jesu EPs, each of which has tweaked the Conqueror template in small ways: A little poppier here or a little heavier there, cranking up the guitars or ditching them in favor of keyboards. Some of these EPs have hidden a few of Jesu's most gorgeous songs, but they can also feel like Broadrick experimenting in public, slowly purging and refining and reshaping his music until he happens on the innovation that will anchor his next big-canvas album.
Jesu: Pale Sketches Demixed both is and isn't one of these EPs. The source material comes from Jesu's 2007 odds-and-ends compilation Pale Sketches. You can certainly hear Jesu's most prominent element, Broadrick's Sabbath-slow variation on Kevin Shields' "glide guitar" sound, on several tracks. But by adopting the Pale Sketcher alias, Broadrick is also serving notice that fans should not come to this record expecting a new Jesu release. Play a techno fan Demixed's closing track, "Plans That Fade (Faded Dub)", and they're more likely to guess it's something off Kompakt's most recent Pop Ambient compilation.
This is familiar ground for Broadrick, who's been part-timing as an electronic musician since Techno Animal's Ghosts in 1991. Hell, the perverse boom-bap of Godflesh's Streetcleaner might even count if we define things broadly enough. The point is: Broadrick knows his beats and synths. Given the source material, though, it's not surprising that his Pale Sketcher tunes are less oppressive, than his previous forays into industrial drum'n'bass (as Krackhead/JK Flesh) and murky drones (as Final). The mid-tempo drift of Pale Sketches Demixed evokes the fluffy electronic post-rock of Seefeel, and the "electronic listening music" of other early Warp acts, more than anything from the world of metal.
Despite its debts to ambient music, Demixed isn't quite background listening, but it definitely favors melody over momentum. This is important to note, considering that Jesu's idea of "momentum" was already about 50 BPM slower than your average pop band's. Leaving Broadrick's voice more or less intact, "The Playgrounds Are Empty (Slumber Mix)" and "Supple Hope" could be Conqueror B-sides, but most of Demixed's fun comes from seeing how far Broadrick can stretch the original Pale Sketches material before the results no longer resemble Jesu at all.
"Don't Dream It (Mirage Mix)" offers a predictably huge riff, with a distorted techno synth standing in for the guitar. But more striking are total rewrites like "Dummy (Banhoff Version)", where Broadrick drops the kind of digitized reggae bassline you'd never expect to hear on a Jesu record. It's unlikely that any of Demixed's one-off experiments will make their way onto the next Jesu full-length, but this is a nice way to tide yourself over until Broadrick unveils the band's next evolutionary step.
