Jesu
Bringing on the Heart Ache
Jesu’s Justin Broadrick relentlessly delves into his dark side

By Jeff Niesel
Born in Birmingham, England, Justin Broadrick has an impressive musical resume. He was a founding member of Godflesh, now legendary for the way it married extreme metal to industrial rock. He’s played with heavy hitters like Napalm Death, Techno Animal and Curse of the Golden Vampire. He’s turned down offers to join Faith No More and Danzig. And now he’s fronting the very experimental Jesu, which has just reissued its 2004 EP Heart Ache along with a collection of new tunes dubbed Dethroned.

“I guess every project, both previous and concurrent, have helped shape Jesu in some way or another,” writes Broadrick in an email exchange, “but ultimately the fundamental difference between these other projects and Jesu is that Jesu is, by design, melody driven. Yet the oppressiveness, bleakness, and the use/importance of texture from all my other works, has informed what Jesu is.”

Starting with the harsh metallic sounds and murmured, repetitive vocals of the 20-minute title track, the music on Heart Ache has such an epic quality, it really distinguishes it from everything else Broadrick has done. Broadrick says he approached the album as an “open-ended” and “never-ending” project that emerged from a “personal vacuum” he was experiencing at the time. 

“Both songs on Heart Ache itself are approximately 20 minutes each; that became my cut off point,” he says. “I worked on each song until I felt that enough was there and that the elements connected well and made some sort of logical whole. The context of Heart Ache was one of taking basic song templates that I had and extending them; recording separate pieces that, for me, could fit the whole picture as I was building it. It was an entirely natural process, not restricted by a conventional song format.”

Given that they were recorded six years ago, the songs on Heart Ache still sound surprisingly fresh. They mix together electronic ambient noises and harsh metallic sounds in a very unique manner.

“I think those songs still exist somewhat in the shadow of my pre Jesu band Godflesh,” Broadrick says. “But they deal with the remnants of Godflesh well. Heart Ache really is a very personal record. I recorded and mixed this record at a very difficult period of my life. I feel the record still holds up well since it appears to reflect this vacuum of loss, self loathing, disenchantment and time of great change that I was existing within around this period.”
The Dethroned songs were written right after the release of Heart Ache. But Broadrick only recently put the finishing touches on them.

“Dethroned already was virtually complete, the songs in the recorded form, besides vocals, sat around gathering dust,” he says. “I just had nowhere to put them, no record that these four songs plus were appropriate to sit on. I also didn’t wish to expand them into a whole LP. They were designed to be an EP. But I also did not wish for the songs to come out after both Heart Ache and the self-titled Jesu LP, since I had already begun working on the basic songs for the Silver EP release, which I felt was heading in a direction i wished to pursue more so than the Dethroned songs. I felt these songs entirely suited this release and set about adding the vocals and then mixing the record, and keeping it faithful to the original concept I had for this EP.”

All of which brings us to Jesu’s future. The band has essentially been a solo project, and Broadrick admits it “doesn’t work collaboratively.” He’s also announced a new project, Pale Sketcher, that will be an outlet for his electronica impulses. But he remains committed to Jesu.

“I can take more risks whilst Jesu can still be dynamic, but not overly eclectic,” he says.

Jesu’s strength, after all, lies in the fact that it’s equal parts shoegazer, grindcore and electronica.

“A lot of what I do straddles genres, but I do feel I have unifying aspects to my music that make it work as a whole, so to speak,” he says. “But I find people generally, and the music industry, need to compartmentalize music, makes some feel like they’re buying into something, or, for the industry, keeps things selling to target audiences. These are issues that I’m not generally concerned with. It means I have to deal with lazy boxes that some will put my music into.”