Jesu – Pale Sketches Review.
Rating: 
He’s a Brummie and has had such ridiculous labels as ‘avant-pop’ and ‘avant-garde doom’ used to describe his music of the vintage of this album, but one thing about Justin Broadrick which cannot be in any way derided is his musical diversity: to have gone from the doom/industrial metal of Birmingham’s Godflesh to the post-metal of earlier Jesu releases to the (oh god) ‘avant-pop’ of this release truly takes someone to whom remaining in a niche means nothing; someone to whom the art is everything and consistency but a crippled runner in the one-hundred metre sprint that is his sense of priority. The opener Don’t Dream It effectively ensures that former Godflesh fanatics are to feel disappointed, if not in some manner betrayed: M83-esque chanting of the phrase ‘don’t dream it’ replaces the former’s more feral fare with an enchantingly daring aplomb; and this chanting finds itself accompanied by dreamy piano amidst a sea of thick bass drums and distorted guitars.
Can I Go Now? takes traditionally electronic synthesised drum patterns and mates them with a second round of shoegazing vocals reminiscent of those of My Bloody Valentine. This hallucinogenic meld of the organic and the synthesised creates an atmosphere conducive to the best of ambiances: a laid-back feel with somehow intellectual overtones; perfection in its ascent from this delicate simplicity to a slightly more voluptuous texture with the addition of Jesu’s almost trademark distorted guitar tone. Track three, Wash it All Away, opens with an increased sense of urgency: a greater tempo with more dense instrumentation. Here, a bassy percussive backbone guides the highs of a synthesiser into a symbiosis left undiscovered in much music: trebly tones and bassy tones combining without messiness. Two-tone guitar repetition carries this song to its end with effortlessness amongst the hazy backdrop of instrumental synergy.
A darker tone is set by synthstrings in the leadup to the chugging start of The Playgrounds are Empty: that ‘Jesu-and-Jesu-only’ tone of bastardised guitar finds its home once again in the wake of Broadrick’s wafer-thin voice; almost a shadow of itself in the chaos that is the plodding rhythm of guitar chords. The distortion is coupled with clean guitars as the song continues, with a more viscous percussive line rearing its head delicately in the bridges between verses. Dummy is a song reeking of Sigur Ros meeting Explosions in the Sky in a former industrial town: objective beauty corrupted by a the dreariness of the vagaries of life; truly, music of the people.
Supple Hope starts with the helical, almost hypnotic swaying of trebly guitars with only the introduction of an addictive bassline serving to disrupt their cyclic beauty. Vocals, once again, lie at he lower end of the audible spectrum and are very much used for their instrumental timbre rather than their lyrical content; and it works deliciously. These build to a climax Godspeed You! Black Emperor would be proud of by the four minute mark, and slowly fade to fragile ambiance once again soon after. Tiny Universities suffers from the complex of almost being Saturdays = Youth era M83 by numbers, and it really does lower the tone of the beauty of the song; especially given the very apparent amount of care which had gone into it.
Luckily, the end of the album is saved from unfavourable claims of emulation of other artists by Plans that Fade, a shoegaze-meets-post-rock-meets-electronica song which is something all of its own. Trance inducing and mind-unwinding, its simplistic guitar lines create the perfect atmosphere for work or play, and borders upon an experience of a spiritual nature. This song is truly a peak in the work of Broadrick and in Jesu’s back catalogue. Though th album may repeat itself in some of its sections and themes, each song is a piece of musical mastery large enough for any such feelings to be overcome by the sheer awe felt in the presence of the exposition of Broadrick’s genius.
