Picture these images clearly in your mind.

Have you ever been to Shiloh national park? It’s a beautiful place. There’s a hill on the eastern side of the park by a clump of young saplings, where bright yellow flowers turn seeking heads to the streaks of sunlight shining in-between the dense cover of trees.

But I’m not here to advertise Shiloh national park, so I’ll get to the point. Picture it on April 8, 1862, just a few days after the battle.

From where those young saplings will stand years and years later, there were once hordes of dead and the slowly dying lying about in that sun-brightened field. Screeches and groans are a cacophony of noise. Soldiers who were driven mad by the noise and emptiness beg dead men for water.

A private, barely older than eighteen, staggers to his unsteady feet by grabbing a tree root and using it to hoist himself up. Blood leaks down his side from a ragged and deep gash in his stomach that’s smeared over with mud. He takes one look up at the intolerably bright sky, and collapses again, and moves no more. Red trickles out of his open mouth, staining his teeth.

But in the center of all this, of all the barren, wasted ground, of all the lives that were torn to shreds by simple and unadulterated greed, of all the desolation… nimbus clouds gather overhead, pregnant with rain, with renewal.

And before the storm, a single, solitary drop of rain, unseen by the inhabitants of the place, plummets to the earth.

jesu is a band that successfully catches both the hopelessness of the first moment and the pure beauty of the second, like a flower sticking its brave head up through a crack in miles and miles of concrete, the only recognizable feature in a vast reach of nothingness.

jesu is the new band by the famous (or at least, deserving of fame) Justin Broadrick, formerly of Napalm Death and, more importantly (in reference to this review, anyway), Godflesh. This record was apparently three years in the making, and was it worth the wait since Godflesh’s eh-whatever last studio record, Hymns, which was vindicated chiefly by Voidhead and dragged down by Deaf, Dumb, and Blind, a song that would not have been too inappropriate appearing on Results May Vary? Was that sentence way too long? Yes. But more importantly, this was definitely worth the three-year wait, and now I barely care that Godflesh is gone, just as long as jesu sticks around for a good long time.

jesu differentiates primarily from Godflesh in the emphasis of guitars way over drums, and a less machinelike feel, with a humanistic approach to melody and songwriting despite the industrial overtones. With solid, crushing riffs and melancholic melodies, this could be quite the thing to ward off summer boredom.

The mix can be most easily likened to a lethargic pea soup fog- heavy, hard to see through to the end, and chokingly thick. The guitars are fuzzed up nicely, and at the forefront. Drums are distant and thoughtful, played slowly but with extreme precision, almost militaristic sounding in both patterns and production. They make you think of a young drummer boy, immaculate in his crisp new uniform; face betraying his fear of death at this age to such an ugly thing as a bullet or sword, but all he can do is play on. The electronics accentuate the guitar work, mostly, sort of like a foil for all that crushing heaviness with depressing but swirling melodies played on all sorts of synthesized instruments. I counted a harpsichord (at least I think it was a harpsichord), a distorted organ, I think there was a violin somewhere in Sun Day, and more that I missed.

The shortest song punches the clock at six minutes and fifty-seven seconds, and the second shortest song is just over eight minutes, so this is not a ‘casual listening’ album. This is an album that you devote time to if you want to get the most out of it, but it rewards you greatly.

The first song, the chugging and depressive as hell Your Path to Divinity, is simply a wondrous composition. There’s no other way to put it. In the three years it took to record this album, Broadrick blended all the elements of this band into a musical milkshake that’s as inviting as it is delicious to the ears. Your Path to Divinity is an example of this, with its harsh but inviting drone that makes you want to cry. The melodies are heart-wrenchingly mournful and well timed. The drums are dank and rhythmic. Broadrick’s heavily modified singing is beautiful and terrible in the same way that the work of a tortured artist is, because you can see the suffering but the man’s translated it into perfection.

Friends Are Evil starts out with a dense riff that could have come off of Pure but didn’t (I checked), and lapses into an almost standard sounding 4/4 drum pattern that’s the musical equivalent of a bait-and-switch. Just after you wonder ‘huh? Where’s the depressiveness and self-loathing and terrible beauty that I bought this album for?’ it lapses back into the alien drone and bass-heavy atmosphere.

Tired of Me is exactly what it sounds like: suicidal and riddled with sarcastic vitriol. Broadrick’s lyrics convey it accurately, but in an unsteady sort of way. Of course, his lyrics don’t really matter; they’re little more than a vehicle for expressing pure emotion and for his delivery. Think of them as Nine Inch Nails lyrics, but more poetic and less caustic for the sake of caustic.

We All Faulter (sic) is a doom-laced industrial epic journey into the alien landscapes of sound, where perception IS reality, whether you like it or not, and the barrenness is only broken by the sounds of sobbing. Supposedly, this and many other songs on the record are inspired by the breakup of Godflesh, and to be honest, I’m not surprised. jesu wasn’t a fitful frolic that he formed for no reason; Godflesh had internal problems and was due to collapse anyway.

Through the next two songs, you’ll probably begin to notice that the touches of melody in these sound pretty similar to those in Your Path to Divinity and Friends Are Evil. This, I believe, was intentional, and done to mold all the songs into a whole that was reflecting off of itself constantly. I love Sun Day especially, though it’s the lightest song on the album. It’s still wondrous and epic and touching in a way that few pieces of music are.

Man/Woman is a bit of a double-take. It’s aggressive and intense in a manner not seen since Streetcleaner, but retains the sense of contemplation and grandeur that permeates this album. Anger can only be a good thing, especially to a fellow like Broadrick, whom I hope either considers his music to be therapy or has a psychologist, because this whole album is like a red flag for suicidal despair.

The fitting closer Guardian Angel is aptly titled, and as carefully crafted as anything on this album. The sludge suffocates you, it rushes up over your cheeks and mouth, but you let it, is the best way to describe this track with its powerful bass line and standout drumming.

Broadrick tried to tie this record into a cohesive whole like no other he’d ever done. I believe that this is probably either the best or second best record of his career, simply because of all the work that went into it. It’s a labor of love and hatred captured in a way that, thanks to the contrast, sounds actually hopeful at times. It’s a record that I will eventually fault myself for having scored too low, but that’s all right, because we all faulter, and jesu is here to remind us of that.