Band:	Jesu
Album:	Jesu
Style:	Drone, Shoegaze
Release date:	December 08, 2004
Guest review by:	Boxcar Willy

01. Your Path To Divinity
02. Friends Are Evil
03. Tired Of Me
04. We All Faulter
05. Walk On Water
06. Sun Day
07. Man/Woman
08. Guardian Angel
09. Your Path To Divinity (The Endless Path) [bonus]
10. Friends are Evil (Highest Throne) [bonus]

Taste… taste changes.
Jesu... Jesu stays the same.

Over the years of listening, exploring and cataloging my music, I have rarely been so emotionally affected by an album. To call this release beautiful is such a demeaning understatement in my eyes.

The overwhelming atmosphere created by many different layers of Jesu’s sound is so unique and soul crushing that it’s hard to explain in typeface. My favourite individual aspect of the gorgeous soundscape is the warm and vibrant bass. The simplistic and droning nature fills a normally open void in this style of music. The fullness of the bass sound feels like being hugged by a group of clouds. It creates a baseline (HEYYY-OOOOOO) for the rest of the music to build off of. Simple, mostly clean and soft-spoken vocals contribute to the album, but are generally few and far between. These vocals are full of effects and delay/echo, which is a trend for most of the instruments on the albums well. The effects allow for so many more textures to be created, and these textures generate a captivating and riveting atmosphere, in an otherwise very musically simple release. The extremely effect ladened synth and guitarwork add a unique and quirky highpoint to the sound. It blends with the bass tone well despite the sounds being so contrasting. This is best heard in tracks like “Friends Are Evil” (an absolute highlight song) and “Sun Day”.

Combining the above with the ritualistic and industrial-style drumming, the tracks mesh together into such a one-off and depressing sound that has yet to be emulated. One could attribute this to the experience of Justin Broadrick. After years of refining his craft through Godflesh, it feels like this Jesu record is a release of pure built-up somber passion that couldn’t be expressed through the already sound-established Godflesh. We get some less than subtle hints of this past in the second-to-last track, which could nearly pass as a Godflesh track itself.

Can you find me another band that so masterfully mixes shoegaze, drone, industrial and doom metal? It’s a combination that should be cold and messy, but it’s not. It shouldn’t sound so perfect, but it does. The album generates feelings of sadness, happiness, anger and everything in between. It is a true shining light in a wasteland full of mediocrity.