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DAILY RECORD: Jesu
Posted by: Necci – May 18, 2011
Jesu – Ascension (Caldo Verde Records)
One of the most difficult tasks for a musician is walking the middle course between the satisfaction and the defiance of expectations. Take Justin Broadrick for example, an artist who's built a three-decade career of avoiding any sort of easy pigeonholing. He has been involved with grindcore pioneers Napalm Death, the industrial pummeling of Godflesh, Techno Animal's corrosive hip hop, and the apocalyptic dark ambience of Final (amongst other projects), all testaments to his ability to work in realms sharing no common thread except a willingness to rush headlong against the boundaries of tonality. While Broadrick's more recent work with Jesu has demonstrated an emphasis on melody that's completely out of step with his previous endeavors, the band's efforts have still relied heavily on an extremity that's more emotional, an overwhelming gloom that permeates their plodding dirges. While it may have been an unexpectedly consonant turn for an artist with such a discordant pedigree, the band quickly established their aesthetic and have clung firmly to it, for better or worse.
Though his earliest releases were a unique blend of doom metal's sluggish pacing and shoegaze's blurry walls of sound (an aesthetic that would become widely imitated), Jesu quickly fell into something of a rut, never really straying from the heavy/pretty duality at all. Even at their most successful, the band's releases can be something of an endurance test, with albums that start strong starting to drag after about four songs and turning straight up painful by the seventy-minute mark. It can be difficult for any artist to retain a sufficient degree of quality to make an hour-plus batch of songs consistently interesting, but Broadrick clings so strongly to the single presiding concept of Jesu that the band's albums tend to suffer as a result.
It would seem easy, then, to write off Jesu's newest as just another in a long line of carbon-copy releases, but that's not entirely accurate – Ascension is far worse than anything else the band has done. Where previous albums could make up for their repetitive meandering with the black hole density of the guitar layers, the newest tends to bury the heaviness in the mix, instead emphasizing acoustic strumming and spacier textures (which, in and of themselves wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but in typical Jesu fashion don't really go anywhere or do anything). And while previous releases had a good sense of pop hooks, buried as they were by the instrumental passages, Ascension's vocals tend to just sound bored. Which isn't to say that the album as a whole is a huge stylistic divergence – it's not, by any means – but the few characteristics that set Jesu apart and could carry their music are largely toned down or omitted altogether.
It's difficult to really figure out what the band was attempting with Ascension. Typically, when a heavier band starts toning down the distortion and throwing in more acoustic guitar, it's a bid for wider accessibility, but it's hard to imagine that being the case with this album. While the approach is generally less abrasive, it also seems less ambitious, as if by leaning more towards the melodic side of their music they would necessarily be forced to sacrifice momentum and aesthetic variation. It's a shame really, both because Jesu has possessed the raw materials to create truly affecting work, but has progressed so little over the course of their output, and because one of the first attempts to break from their self-imposed mold is as disappointing as Ascension ended up being.
By Graham Scala
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