It is often a piece of music (or art in general) is described as soulless. While normally a throw-away assessment more useful in informing the listener/reader of the arrogance of its utterer, there can be no doubt that Streetcleaner is perhaps the one album that would deservedly earn such a moniker. Godflesh is a masterful manifestation of no-nonsense misanthropy, and while both G.C. Green and Justin Broadrick would continue their musical careers at the very highest level, their clear magnum opus in hate is Streetcleaner.
In the late nineties, the United States government attempted to build a repository for nuclear waste in the Yucca mountains. While so far in limbo, it required the summoning of some of the finest minds available to answer one very simple question - how can we turn humans away from something which is unquestionably hurtful and dangerous. To achieve this end, one so fundamentally aligned and yet fittingly ignorant of humanity's most persistent traits like greed and curiosity, one of the ideas proposed was the creation of a landscape of thorns. This would have been a vast installation of jagged spires set up in unsymmetric patterns, inspiring dread and unease in the most primal part of its viewers brains, provoking a sheer physical response of terror and disgust.
Streetcleaner is this in an aural form. There is no album which is endrenched in something so vile, so counterproductive to whatever we seek to define humanities goals as, and it seeks to tackle it in the most head on way. Justin Broadrick is on record saying that they want Godflesh to inspire a clear physical reaction in its listener and this it succeeds beyond reason. The onslaught of screeching guitar feedback, larynx-rattling bass and fragmentation grenade drums is so apt in stabbing that part of the lizard brain that I constantly find myself twitching and contorting to the ferociously uncaring auditory assault. Broadrick's snarling reads of the sacral texts of hate on top of this utter avalanche of unrelenting musical disgust drive the point home even further. "There is no honour here," indeed.
What Streetcleaner achieves through all this is a connection and exploration of humanity in a way few other pieces of art can. The listener is presented with a vision of ourselves at our most twisted, most animalistic, served through the industrial-strength looking glass of the modern age. This pulverized mixture of flesh and machine is horrifyingly gigeresque and most disturbingly, there is no note of belittling pious judgement or even optimism here - it feels... human. It feels inevitable.
It feels right.
