ALBUM REVIEW: Godflesh - "Post Self"

By: Mark Ambrose

Album Type: Full-length

Date Released: 17/11/2017

Label: Avalanche Recordings

It may be a disturbing, challenging last will and testament of humanity’s futurist hopes and dreams, but “Post Self” is an invigorating, complex, and honest piece of industrial metal.  Perhaps most importantly, in a genre that can be glutted with repetitive speed metal riffs and samples of shouting despots, Godflesh stands as one of the smartest bands working today.

“Post Self” CD//DD//LP track listing

1). Post Self

2). Parasite

3). No Body

4). Mirror of Finite Light

5). Be God

6). The Cyclic End

7). Pre Self

8). Mortality Sorrow

9). In Your Shadow

10). The Infinite End

The Review:

               

Crack into any futurist, or hell, even a Neil DeGrasse Tyson wiki-hole, and all sorts of wild speculative bullshit will have you thinking we’re on the cusp of some magical utopia – a paradigm shift, or line of code, or thinkfluential bleeding edge app from unlocking the Jetsons vision of tomorrow.  The transhumanist vision of Ray Kurzweil, the cult of revelatory Singularity, is just the latest, scientific positivist take on apocalyptic rapture snake oil.  With the right tech, the right drive, the right “difficult geniuses” at the helm, we’re all going to beat death and toil and everything desperate and mind-numbing about modern life and finally have the time to bask in our uploaded consciousness for all eternity.  Nevermind the endless sequence of fuckups modernity seems to display – the relentless argument AGAINST letting mankind extend its petty bullshit ad infinitum.  If any band were to write the soundtrack for humanity’s defeat at the inexorable reality of death, it’s Godflesh.  And with “Post Self”, their eighth album, and second since reforming in 2010, Justin Broadrick and G.C. Green have crafted a distinctly industrial, metallic slab of nihilistic dread.  A haunting eulogy for a species intent on extinguishing all its potential in a solipsistic pursuit of immortality.

               

From the highly processed guitar crunch, to the inverted disco backbeat, the opening title track sets the stage for a Godflesh album that lurks in the niches of queasy anxieties.  There are few fully rocking industrial metal moments in “Post Self”, and that decision seems to be a conscious one – Broadrick and Green acknowledged they hewed closer to a foundation of early industrial and post-punk, and the ties to Throbbing Gristle, Public Image Ltd. and Einsturzende Neubautenare, perhaps, more distinct than they’ve ever been.  On a heavily dissonant track like “Parasite”, the wheedling guitar lead sounds so contrary, so confrontational, so “anti-hook” that it can’t possibly be “rocking”.  The doomy “Be God”, with vocals so processed that they sound like an entirely inhuman language, is remarkably underscored by a dreampop guitar coda, with defiantly beautiful tones that ebb and flow like an ocean of battery acid.  The shoegaze sound bleeds into “The Cyclic End”.  The clean vocals are a welcome respite in the warped hellscape of Godflesh’s “Post Self” – but of course the sweetness has to curdle by the finale.

               

“Pre Self”opens with one of the most harrowing guitar licks I’ve ever heard.  A solitary, echoing clang set against an ambient background, Broadrick adds a simple beat and clean vocal litany that, as I listened looking out across the polluted industrial skyline of Newark, was as depressing as a Lars Von Trier marathon.  This amplification of loneliness runs through the album, but is sometimes obscured by soundscapes or effects.  The deranged surf guitar of “In Your Shadow”, or the psychedelic tones of “Mortality Sorrow” can sometimes sideline the hopelessness at “Post Self’s” core.  But with the restrained synthetic strings of “The Infinite End”, the message is clear: this is a requiem mass for a humanity already doomed.  The sparks of soul or individuality within the ten preceding tracks are ghosts in a machine – corrupted, decayed remnants of mankind.  The Singularity is a pipe dream – we have already encoded ourselves into our digital tombstones, and after we leave a used husk of a planet, these vague, screeching entreaties for meaning and salvation will remain.  It may be a disturbing, challenging last will and testament of humanity’s futurist hopes and dreams, but “Post Self” is an invigorating, complex, and honest piece of industrial metal.  Perhaps most importantly, in a genre that can be glutted with repetitive speed metal riffs and samples of shouting despots, Godflesh stands as one of the smartest bands working today.  If they can look to their past and still offer an album so prescient and confrontational, there are a few things we can still be optimistic about in 2018.

“Post Self” is available here

Band info: bandcamp|| facebook