After a slew of Jesu releases
throughout their history, things seemed to have quieted down for the
band in recent months. 2008 brought the Why
Are We Not Perfect
EP and a few guest appearances here and there, but 2009 has been
utterly Jesu-free
until now. Infinity
is
the first scheduled Jesu
release
for this year, consisting of one 49-minute monster of a song. Now
considering songs that break the 40-minute mark tend to be either
horrifically bloated and wandering, or, even worse, incredibly bitty
and seemingly made up of 10 or so underworked songs strung together
to seem more worthy (the title tracks of both Porcupine
Tree's
alarming own goal The
Incident
and Dream Theater's
Six Degrees Of
Inner Turbulence
both fall squarely in this category). Infinity,
however, falls into the former, starting off full of promise before
fizzling out into aimless droning halfway through. And drone, which
few seem to be able to understand, is more than just playing random
chords as slowly and loudly as possible. It's about atmosphere,
specifically created by a throbbing low-end and howling feedback,
both of which the overly digital production fails to capture. Justin
K. Broadrick apparently programmed the drums for this one, which
seems more than a little pointless and time-consuming considering the
band already have a perfectly capable drummer.
This,
coupled with his Greymachine
project, seems to signify a hunger by JKB for the kind of angry,
pounding metal he used to play in Godflesh,
but here he's attempted to marry his previous band's metallic stomp
with the blissed-out vibes of prime Jesu,
and it just doesn't gel. Infinity
starts off promisingly, with shoegazey textures building up over an
ambient keyboard loop and a rhythmic repeating noise pattern.
Suddenly, we shift abruptly into a doomy riff and rattling industrial
drums, with JKB crooning away in the background. It's good, but the
song makes no sense in getting there. But from here it seems to be
plain sailing, locking into a nice groove, with things progressively
chuggier and heavier as we go along. But it seems as if each riff is
getting subtly less interesting than the last, and it's down to JKB's
vocals returning at the 15-minute-mark to try and maintain our
interest. Admittedly I was never a fan of his growling in Godflesh,
and
to me it just doesn't fit the Jesu
sound.
Things pick up with a feedbacky ambient section at around 20 minutes,
but a few minutes later everything drops out, and we're in full-on
drone country, but not very good drone at that. There's the odd bit
of processed vocals in there, but with very little backing up JKB's
echo-y wail it just doesn't sound right.
And
from here Infinity
wanders off into some perfectly agreeable drone riffs and guitar
melodies which do absolutely nothing to hold my attention. Cut off
the song at roughly 25-minutes and you've got a reasonable release
here, but the second half is little more than a very, very
extended outro and really feels very unneeded. At the very least, it
should have been edited down. Things seem to pick up with the roar of
a bass guitar towards the end, but it comes to nothing and the song
melts away into ambient noise. There's no climax, no real need for
the past 20 minutes to have even happened. Infinity
isn't
a bad album, just a very unremarkable one, and by the end of your
thoughts will no doubt drift into any of the infinitely more
interesting things you could have been doing with your time.