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A World Lit Only by Fire is Godfleshs first album in 13 years. Their last, 2001s Hymns, effectively disassembled itself in order for Broadrick to scavenge its chassis for scraps, which he then used to build Jesu. Most obviously, the final track of Hymns is titled Jesu but instead of being a swansong, it was a two-part, 13-minute premonition of what was to come. Jesu went on to indulge Broadricks latent love of shoegaze and melody, but it retained every milligram of Godfleshs heaviness; when Broadrick issued Godfleshs comeback EP, Decline and Fall, earlier this year, it wasnt so much a return to form as a transference of force. But where Decline and Fall unlocked the door, A World Lit Only by Fire knocks down the entire wall surrounding it. New Dark Ages is the records method of entry, and its accordingly annihilative: A spindly beat pulls back the skin to reveal sleek, minimalist musculature, and those riffs crush Broadricks windpipe as he gets biblical with his opening warning: Dont look back/ Well dissolve. The resurgence of fundamentalist medievalism have been a concern of industrial music ever since SPKs 1983 classic Another Dark Age and New Dark Ages casts that creeping fear in a coat of millennial chrome.
Much of the album doggedly refuses to deviate from the template of New Dark Ages, which itself isnt that much of a departure from what Godflesh laid down on their 1989 debut album, Streetcleaner. The roboticized crust of the Godflesh of old, though, has been trimmed to fit an even bleaker era. Instead of being discreet compositions, these songs are segments of a single continuum, amputated from each other. Shut Me Down,Curse Us All, and Carrion flow into each otherinasmuch as anything on such a tense, brittle album could be said to flowwith an almost martial uniformity. The distinctions are in the shades of texture and syncopation. In some places, bassist G.C. Green evokes the corroded-carburetor clang of Big Black; elsewhere, Broadricks righteous roar gets caught in the gears of the albums drum-machine march, if not the hopelessness of its protests.
Broadrick first flexed his skills as a slightly more conventional singer/songwriter in Jesu, but hed begun exploring tunefulness toward the end of Godfleshs first run. That eerie blend of ugliness and melody doesnt crop up often on A World Lit Only by Fire; when it does, its for terrific effect. Life Giver Life Taker and Imperator mix wailing echoes and spectral chants with chiseled riffs and insectoid rhythms, while Towers of Emptiness and Forgive Our Fathers trail off the same waywith Broadricks voice, naked and human, hovering over ghostly drones and incanting the title of the track like its a faded memory. Forgive Our Fathers is particularly gorgeous; ditching his cyborg-barbarian howl halfway through, he switches to the melancholy coo of Jesu just long enough to trap and loop the songs lingering anguish in an apocalyptic fugue. As a whole, A World Lit Only by Fire represents music converted into motionkinetic and mechanical, inexorable and inhuman. Godflesh, never a forgiving band, has never sounded so relentless.
-Pitchfork