WHEN PELICAN MET JESU

Trevor, à esquerda, quando trouxemos os Pelican ao Porto-Rio. 2007

Jesu no Amplifest 2011, o primeiro de sempre.

With more than 20 projects to his credit over the past 30-plus years, the band that seems to exemplify Justin Broadrick’s demeanor—unassuming, genial, passionate, rapt—is Jesu, his ongoing experiment in merging the emotional and textural essence of shoegaze with the bludgeoning hooks of heavy metal. Formed in the wake of Godflesh’s breakup in 2002, its melodic undercurrent represented a huge stylistic shift for Broadrick, tapping a wellspring of inspiration in the process, as a seemingly endless series of albums and one-off EPs unfurled over the following decade.

The interview below was first conducted in 2011, right around the release of Jesu’s third proper full-length, Ascension. The album demonstrated a bit of a shift for the project, which had built its reputation on atmosphere over structure. The compositions that make up the album are dense and dark—far more structural than the work that preceded it—and in some ways reflexive of the album’s unlikely relationship to Mark Kozelek, who released it on his Caldo Verde imprint.

In the years that followed, Jesu went silent as a newly reformed Godflesh, the ambient solo project Final, Jesu’s electronic alter-ego Pale Sketcher, and an industrial behemoth of a record by alter-ego JK Flesh took up most of Broadrick’s time. Considering Jesu’s first seven years produced seven EPs, two albums, three splits, an album-length song, and a compilation of studio outtakes, two years of silence seemed like a veritable eternity, but the long incubation clearly served Jesu’s new full-length (Every Day I Get Closer to the Light From Which I Came) well. Splitting the difference between the developed songwriting of Ascension and the dense, heavy production and atmosphere of his earlier works, it paints in deep sonic brushstrokes, rendering a evocative and sublime portrait of the complex emotions that accompany middle age and parenthood…

O Trevor dos Pelican entrevistou o Justin Broadrick, podem ler aqui. É das entrevistas que mais gostei de ler nos últimos tempos, obrigado Gustavo.