April 2020 Feature Release - The Sphere Edition

It's now April which of course means that we'll be nominating a brand new monthly feature release for each clan. This essentially means that we're asking you to rate, review & discuss our chosen features for no other reason than because we enjoy the process & banter. 

This month's feature release for The Sphere is 1989's classic debut full-length English industrial metal legends Godflesh entitled "Streetcleaner". The album is widely regarded as the pinnacle of the industrial metal sound & you'll rarely find a colder & more crushing piece of work. It's definitely not for the faint-hearted but we think that most of you extreme metal fans will really dig it.

Back to Godflesh it seems.

For what it's worth I definitely see the importance of Streetcleaner and I enjoyed it more than Selfless, but I still don't get a whole lot out of it. The interesting topic that springs to mind though is comparing Godflesh to Ministry in terms of the beginning of Industrial Metal as a genre. Streetcleaner is a cold and grinding hulk of music that is raw and repetitive in all the right ways, even though I'm not necessarily a fan of it. Ministry, on the other hand, has more song structure and melody to them, as Daniel explained to me a few months ago. I find this interesting because it shows how some bands that come out swinging with a new genre for their first album have such different qualities than other bands that may decide to dip into something new after being established. Streetcleaner was Godflesh's debut album, which is a feat in of itself, while The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste and Psalm 69 were Ministry's fourth and fifth albums respectively after shifting from synthpop and electronic. Therefore, Godflesh has that rawness that you can only really get from greenhorn bands wanting to come out and just make something incredibly angry and dark. It's still not my thing, but I can see where the hype is coming from now rather than when I listened to Selfless. 

3.5/5

Well said Xephyr. I've read an interview with Godflesh mastermind Justin Broadrick where he says that "Streetcleaner" was the outcome of the group repeatedly watching David Lynch's "Eraserhead" whilst under the influence of LSD. That makes a lot of sense once you hear "Streetcleaner" because it's just as confronting & polarizing in its incredibly cold atmosphere. I absolutely love this record. In fact, I regard it as the absolute pinnacle of the industrial metal subgenre.