This month the new album, "Purge" arrives with an accompanying tour from one of the all-time defining industrial and hardcore acts of the 1990's, Justin Broadrick and G.C. Green's Godflesh. The duo reformed in 2013 to play some of the most punishing, loud, assaulting music ever created by man and machine. While this may sound like the typical hyperbole of music press in response to anything on the heavy end of the spectrum, their (then final) US tour for the 1996 "Songs of Love and Hate" album established them as a band of very few equals in this realm. That release made its way onto albums of the year lists for magazines as disparate as Terrorizer and The Wire, and its companion "...in Dub", was a convergence of the purity of metal assault of earlier Godflesh with a growing fascination with the weighty rhythms and hooks of dub reggae and hip hop. The latter coming to explicitly inform Justin Broadrick's splinter project with The Bug's Kevin Martin through the late 1990s and early 2000s as Techno Animal. These varied convergences of dub, electronic music, industrial, shoegaze, hardcore and metal have been channeled into Broadrick's ceaseless musical reinvention in solo and splinter projects in the last decade. Resulting in the trio of Zonal, his solo industrial techno JK Flesh project, Pale Sketcher's sublime ambience, and Jesu's spacious drone rock. As an entry point into his multifaceted pursuit of sound, Broadrick's meeting with Pelican's Trevor de Brauw in 2013, to discuss Jesu's , "Everyday I Get Closer To The Light From Which I Came" acts as an exploration of the past, present and future of the Godflesh guitarist, "When Pelican Met Jesu". Broadrick has been outspoken and generous in recent years, offering insightful interviews on art, life, parenthood and hardship, "Quite Annihilating: A Chat with Justin Broadrick of Godflesh", for The Quietus, "Extreme Language: An Interview with Justin K. Broadrick", and "Songs of The Flesh: The Strange World of... Justin Broadrick", as well as talking with Bandcamp, "As JK Flesh, Godflesh’s Justin Broadrick Finds Peace in Solitude and Techno". Absorbing all of the varied explorations of the decade before, the new sound of Broadrick and G.C. Green is one which encompasses their breadth but also reasserts the weight of Godflesh's singular sonic impression. This sound can be heard on a set of albums beginning with "A World Lit Only by Fire", and "Post Self", as well as the two anthologies, "Long Live the New Flesh", and its companion, "New Flesh in Dub". Their newest arrives on the eve of "Godflesh Announces North American Tour" beginning in the Southwest at Austin's Oblivion Access Festival, and then continuing on to the west coast with a date at Seattle's El Corazon.
