Godflesh - Streetcleaner
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Recently I was listening to Godflesh’s Pure/Cold World/Slavestate 3-disc reissue that Earache put out, and I couldn’t help thinking that the music was fantastic but also quite dated. In referencing the techno and hip-hop of the day, Justin Broadrick was pushing boundaries. But contemporary sounds inevitably become obsolete.
Streetcleaner, which turns 20 today according to Wikipedia, suffers no such fate. It is “industrial metal” in that it employs a drum machine and descends from Swans. But otherwise it is sui generis. Broadrick programs the percussion almost without reference to humanity. There are kicks and snares, but no human would play them so cruelly and single-mindedly. The drum machine transcends being a musical instrument and becomes a pure weapon.
Purity makes Streetcleaner timeless. It does not need genre to operate. It is a howl of humanity in the face of its inhumanity, whether by machines or its own misdeeds: “You breed! Like rauuuts!” Aptly, the cover image comes from Altered States, whose tagline was “When he heard his cry for help, it wasn’t human.” If Black Sabbath fired the first guitar-based salvo against the industrialized world, fellow Brummies Godflesh completed the task 20 years later.
All those cyborg movies of the ’80s — Blade Runner, Terminator, Robocop, Evil Dead — Streetcleaner stripped them down to pure dread. Broadrick created a mechanized monster much larger than himself. No wonder he felt discomfort inhabiting it and eventually abandoned its shell. However, this tweet by Earache label head Digby Pearson has caused much speculation. Iron Man lives again, perhaps?
Buy:
Amazon (LP)
Amazon (CD)
Amazon (MP3)
Earache US (CD, LP)
Earache EU (CD, LP)
