Jesu "Dead Eyes"
Thursday, August 31, 2006
It takes a lot of patience, I’m assuming, to sculpt and shape the amount of noise in a song like “Dead Eyes” (mp3), into a lulling, actually quite soothing if allowed to be, slab of trance-metal. Justin Broadrick, late of Napalm Death and Godflesh, layers looped guitar sections on top of backward samples while industrial drum smacks push through the haze and ultra-ultra low frequency synth notes vibrate with dark electricity. It all combines to edge the music toward ambient post-rock territory, but with the theatricality and hypnotic tendencies of the best black metal and the atmospheric restraints of a seasoned film composer. It’s all about stillness, actually, encouraging you to draw your focus to a point somewhere behind the composited sounds and allow the music to rush past your head. Then, at about the four minute mark, Broadrick drops a towering, droning guitar that rises through the ambience, but still perfectly matches everything around it. It is metal, after all.
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