JK Flesh - Posthuman

Justin Broadrick is back with a new album from his JK Flesh project, nine tracks of churning, grinding industrial business with fuzzed out vocals and dirty rumbling grooves. The wild vocals and constant layers of scuzz ensure there's an unhinged physicality to it even though it still has that grinding computerised monotony. It's much more like a post-dubstep take on the seething industrial torment of Godflesh than his more recent post-metally Jesu project, with relentless scratchy overdriven tones and a mixture of live and computerised drums, taking us from doomy Melvins-esque paranoia to more violent industrial dance scree to boomy drone terror. The highlight for me has got to be 'Punchdrunk', which opens with spooky high-pitched techno beats with gliding drones and flexing synth squelches before a repetitive guitar line builds a hypnotic Burial-esque melody. When he's restrained like this it's actually pretty dancefloor-friendly, but the emphasis on this album does tend to be more on the side of the twitchy, dark, intense material. It's a really full-sounding, intense record. The Broadrick faithful will lap this up since it's got plenty of his trademark distinctive, detailed, doomy vibes, but it's forward-thinking enough to show that he's by no means resting on his laurels.