If Trent Reznor can win an Oscar for scoring a movie about Facebook and Ministry’s Al Jourgensen can read the five-day Los Angeles forecast for thousands of perplexed viewers in El Paso, there’s no reason to be surprised by the rebirth of Godflesh. When the band broke up in 2002 following the departure of bassist G.C. Green, its death seemed final. Justin Broadrick fell into a depression, canceling their tour and rarely leaving the house, ultimately solidifying the group's passing in a promotional poster for his next project that proclaimed : “Godflesh is dead. Long live Jesu.” But here comes Broadrick more than a dozen years later, wizened by his years spent making post-rock and, with Green back in tow, promising an LP and an EP from Godflesh in 2014. They return with Decline and Fall, a four-track show of force that laughs off any notions that they've fallen off.
Godflesh’s metal machine music resurfaces at a time where satellites and fiber optics networks muffle the once-unchallenged roars of factory machines. The production of Decline and Fall could be heard as band’s protest against the sanitization of these industrial sounds. Godflesh remain fiercely loyal to lo-fi, treating songs like as caustic exercises in overstimulation. “Ringer” stirs up shivers by way of a direct confrontation with mechanical chaos: the drums lock into a dull, arrythmic throb picked up by the grizzled bass, leaving Broadrick to embellish the din with a combination of throaty growls and slightly soured singing. In turn, “Playing With Fire” welds these rotting melodies together into grating harmonies that attract and repel in equal measure.
Elsewhere, Godflesh reach for the crunchy industrial rock of their prime: half of the EP remains entrenched in rhythmic, bass-heavy metal that some listeners have preemptively dubbed “Kornflesh.” This pejorative, of course, ignores the appropriation of the band’s hybridized sound by more palatable commercial artists such as Faith No More (whose invitation to join Broadrick turned down), Fear Factory, and yes, Korn. At the same time, it captures what makes gnarled jams like “Dogbite” so compelling: namely, that Godflesh can return from a 12-year absence—long after the demise of nu-metal, for that matter—having perfected and refined the style of their co-opters. Such a reclamation manifests itself in “Dog Bite” in the form of a thick, sludgy guitar hook that stomps along to form a rowdy groove, an approach they take again on the title track, this time with a greater emphasis on the drum machine for an unexpected hit of hip-hop.
Avant and yet strangely accessible, industrially-minded but all-embracing, Decline and Fall confirms that a decade-plus-long absence has dulled neither Godflesh’s industrial spirit, nor their devotion to experimentation. Will they be able to sustain that line of energy for an entire album? That question must go unanswered until the release of A World Lit Only By Fire, the band's first full-length since 2001.
