Now's as good a time as any to ramp up the campaign for Conqueror, the full-length Jesu's Justin Broadrick released in the doldrums of February this year. If Silver, the EP that was Jesu's sole 2006 output, had been a pop leap from the glacial pace and brooding dirges Broadrick pounded out on the previous year's Jesu, Conqueror was the record that brought together all of Broadrick's diverging impulses. This was a guy who at the age of 18 cared more about New York art-rock and the Swans than he did about his own extreme-metal outfit, Napalm Death; who longed to emulate the wrist-cutting shoegaze of Red House Painters and gothic punk of Joy Division even as he grinded out industrial metal with his band Godflesh; and who by his own admission has been obsessed with the melodies in 1960s and 70s pop music, even as he eliminated traces of it from his various bands' sounds. Conqueror, which finally left nothing out, was a record decades in the making-- one would've thought after it Broadrick would be momentarily left without much to say.
Instead, Broadrick embarked on the most productive year in Jesu's history: the Sun Down/Sun Rise EP in April; a split with Eluvium in July; a rarities compilation, entitled Pale Sketches, released earlier this month; and now Lifeline, his fifth release in six months. In interviews he seems like a happier person, and in March, Jesu crossed the Atlantic for the first time in the band's history to play live in the states. They return again this month. Whatever Broadrick's discovered is working for him.
On Lifeline, a short four-song EP for Hydra Head, Broadrick returns to the same sources-- gauzy, swirling guitars and ephemeral vocals, clarion bouts of melody, and that slow ascending arc-- adding only a duet with Jarboe, the prolific ex-Swans, called "Storm Comin' On". This track-- a rare departure from Broadrick's studio-centric meticulousness-- seems at first typical, with Jarboe merely taking Broadrick's role as muted vocalist. But within seconds she's clawing her way above the surface of Broadrick's instrumental, and her struggle to get on top of Jesu's atmospheric bleed gets at how complexly crafted (and how deceptively difficult) Broadrick's songs tend to be.
On any given Jesu track Broadrick writes not two or three melodic and rhythmic lines but something like seven or eight; his echoing, often looped, and diffused vocals play the role of two or three more. This level of detail-- and of self-effacement, since Broadrick buries any number of singular riffs alongside one another-- is what Broadrick discovered with Conqueror, and what made that record so renewable. "Storm", perhaps in deference to Jarboe, strips away most of the layers; the rest of the album falls somewhere in between. "Lifeline" is the type of enormous and elegiac builder Broadrick does effortlessly. "End of the Road" sees a turn for the more openly indie, and blatantly melodic-- best is its prolonged outro, where Broadrick does away with guitars entirely in favor of lighthanded, atmospheric production. It's two minutes of metal without a single identifiable instrument. Once again-- if just a bit-- Broadrick moves forward.
