Album review: Godflesh – A World Lit Only By Dub

Ten years ago, Justin Broadrick and Ben Green truly brought Godflesh back from the dead. Not just ending a drought of recorded output that had run on since 2001’s Hymns, the Birmingham industrialists’ scourging seventh album A World Lit Only By Fire marked a return to the grindingly cacophonous signature sound with which they made their name on 1987’s epochal Streetcleaner. Arriving out of nowhere, this five-track dub remix EP celebrates a decade of AWLOBF by reimagining and recontextualising its defining moments. A surprise to be sure, but a bleakly brilliant one.

Godflesh have famously dabbled in dub before. 1996’s Songs Of Love And Hate was remixed as 1997’s Love And Hate In Dub, while 2021’s New Flesh In Dub Vol. 1 brought together a host of remixes from the ‘reformation’ era, highlighting their experimentalism and drive for devastating diversity. What sets A World Lit Only By Dub apart, arguably, is its throbbing reinterpretation of Godflesh’s darkest, gnarliest, most texturally-incompatible sounds. The duo themselves explain that Cursed By You All (a 547-second rework of Curse Us All) and Dead Ending (Deadend deconstructed over 10 minutes) are ‘mutations’ of the earlier work, and in both their distended sonic fabric and unchecked, organically free-roaming runtimes that’s exactly how these compositions come across.

Sharper and more pointedly serrated, the 2014 originals will remain the definitive texts, but surpassing one of the greatest industrial albums of the 21st century was clearly never the objective here. Instead, the steroidal bulk, softer focus and more abstract leanings of Life Given Life Taken and the wiry, electrified atmospherics of Our Fathers In Heaven feel like poignant interpretations of how listeners’ relationships with even profoundly oppressive music changes with time and repetition, or how ‘definitive’ works ultimately grow arms and legs beyond their creators’ control. They’re bangers too, mind. Never more so than on final track Towers, which rebirths 2014’s nightmarishly metallic Towers Of Emptiness as a euphoric, house-tinged post-rock epic ready for goth club dancefloors.

Never an outfit interested in casual listeners, it hardly needs to be said that Godflesh’s A World Lit Only By Dub will be of interest only to open-minded devotees of all things dark, electronic and experimental. But if that’s you, there’ll be no better sounds this December with which to embrace the winter blues.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Ministry, Leftfield, Killing Joke

A World Lit Only By Dub is out now via Avalanche