Ah, jesu, how I adore thee. Your ambient, beautiful sadness, your strangely-defined borderlines of creativity, where dreams breed in that breathless sleep between death and life. May thou never perish as did the mighty Godflesh, but they perished to create thee and so their death be commended. Amen.

Sorry, just doing my morning prayers. I’ll get around to reviewing the EP now.

This is the Heart Ache EP, recorded in late 2004 when Broadrick was starting to put the finishing touches on the self-titled jesu release. Think of this as Broadrick severing his final connections to Godflesh, and so clearing the path for Jesu to march in and take over.

This was recorded by Broadrick on his own time, by himself, and thus has programmed drums that, oddly enough, sound similar to the drums used on Selfless but not as dominating throughout the mix. If you liked Godflesh, then this shouldn’t bother you in the slightest, but I do miss the precise militaristic drumming of Ted Parsons that we heard on the jesu release. Too bad. The guitars are tuned mainly to a Skullflower-esque tone nipped from Xaman that makes a nice homage to one of latter-day Godflesh’s bigger influences, and the vocals walk the fine line between Broadrick’s more melodic delivery on the Jesu release and his more aggressive vocals from way back when with old Godflesh.

Heart Ache is two songs long, and both of them are really… lengthy. So don’t bother to start listening to this EP unless you intend to finish listening to it, because you’ll feel silly to listen to fifteen minutes of a nineteen minute song and then have to stop.

The title track starts the ball rolling with a slow, droning guitar riff, underneath which lies an extremely loud bass and a heavy, plodding drumbeat. Out of that emerges a choir, interspersed with moments of simple but effective guitar melodies and slight distortion. Heart Ache is the kind of song you put on while sitting back in an old rocking chair on your porch with a quart of hard cider, watching the sunset, and lamenting the state of the world.

The first seven minutes or so of Ruined nearly ruin the EP. It starts out with a soft piano intro.

That lasts for seven minutes.

Listen, I don’t care if you can play a few chords. So can I. Anyone can play a few chords on the piano if they’re played this slowly, repetitively and gracelessly. Stick to what you’re good at, Broadrick, please. Seriously, the first seven minutes of this song are basically: ‘Note, Chord, Chord, Note, Note, Note, Chord,’ without any sense of melody or dynamic that’s usually present in stuff that Broadrick does. It’s like… that hilariously terrible Coldplay single that dominated rock-radio in 2003, The Scientist.

Luckily, if you make it through the piano intro, the actual song starts. It’s chunky and aggressive and powerful in a way that resembles the general songwriting on Pure superficially, with Broadrick shouting over an oddly choppy riff. He shouts ‘Rise Rock’ a bunch of times, and then at the very end, there’s this oddly… Chinese soundscape. It has that epic Eastern feel. That’s probably the best part of the song.

In conclusion, is this better than jesu? Hell no. Is it worth buying? Yes, it is. Might work as a transition into jesu’s style for Godflesh fans who can’t quite grasp it.