Streetcleaner is the debut studio album of English industrial metal band Godflesh. It was released on 13 November 1989 through Earache Records. The album was widely acclaimed by critics and is often cited as a landmark album in the industrial metal genre. Streetcleaner has since been remastered, reissued, and praised as the band's signature album.
In 2013, Godflesh released a live album performing Streetcleaner in its entirety. The album was originally distributed on vinyl and later saw release digitally and on CD in 2017.
Video Streetcleaner (album)
Background
In 1986, English musicians Justin Broadrick, G. C. Green, and Paul Neville recorded a demo, Extirpate, together as the band Fall of Because. After Broadrick dissolved the group to join Head of David as a drummer, the three briefly parted ways. In 1988, Broadrick left Head of David and contacted Green to reform Fall of Because. This reformation became Godflesh, and three songs from Extirpate were turned into Godflesh tracks, two of which appear on Streetcleaner ("Devastator" and "Life Is Easy") and can be heard in their original rough state on the 1999 compilation Life Is Easy.
Streetcleaner was recorded in several sessions. The first five songs were recorded by Broadrick and Green at Soundcheck, a studio in Birmingham, from May to August 1989. The next five songs were recorded at Square Dance in Derby in May 1989 with the reintroduction of Neville as second guitarist. The last four songs were originally recorded before Streetcleaner as a separate EP titled Tiny Tears, which the band wanted their label, Earache Records, to release as the follow-up to their self-titled EP. Earache, however, pushed the band to record a full-length album instead, and the Tiny Tears EP never saw independent release. The songs were appended as bonus tracks to the CD versions of Streetcleaner.
The album's cover is a still frame of a hallucination scene from the 1980 Ken Russell movie Altered States.
Maps Streetcleaner (album)
Composition and style
Streetcleaner is one of the first albums to merge industrial music and heavy metal. The album accomplishes such a fusion with its heavy reliance upon the drum machine along with Green's driving bass and Broadrick's distorted guitar and guttural vocals. Writing for The Quietus, Noel Gardner said, "the original nine tracks [...] effect a great compromise, in a brilliantly uncompromising way, between making a drum machine sound like the consummate heavy metal instrument and making metal guitars sound like their bulk renders them unplayable by human hands." In The Rough Guide to Rock, Richard Fontenoy said, "With the heaviest of metal riffs, slowed down to a crushing, claustrophobic pace and backed by a drum machine, Godflesh created a relentless, alienating wall of sound overlaid with feedback, samples, and Broadrick's misanthropic vocals." The use of the drum machine, an Alesis HR-16, was in part inspired by the American bands Big Black and Swans and by hip hop music, like Public Enemy and Eric B. & Rakim. About the instrument, Broadrick said:
"That was an amazing machine. It's fucking mental, mostly because you could layer kicks. You could layer everything. Most of what the Godlfesh early sound was--you could literally blend six kick drums. Other drum machines we played with at the time, they sounded much more plasticky and much more synthetic, and they also didn't have the ability to tune. What we were doing was, like, putting three kick drums together and tuning two of them to -12, and shit like that. We weren't doing it with any sense of technical perfection; we were doing it because it sounded rough, because it sounded raw and nasty."
Aside from mechanical percussion, Streetcleaner employs another staple of industrial music: samples, the most notable of which appears as the introduction to the album's title track. The audio clip is the voice of convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, taken from an interrogation.
Release
Streetcleaner was originally released on 13 November 1989 through Earache Records. It was remastered and reissued on 21 June 2010. This reissue includes a second disc of bonus material, which is composed of alternate mixes, live excerpts from 1990, guitar and drum machine demo tracks, and rehearsals.
Critical reception
Streetcleaner received critical acclaim and was later hailed as a creative masterpiece. Ned Raggett of AllMusic said, "Compared to so many metal wimps who invoke Satan and death in the cheesiest of ways [...] Godflesh let their own brusque impact do the talking for them, and the result is suitably apocalyptic." Raggett also wrote that "the band deliver everything with a pinpoint precision". Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot stated that "the sonic landscape is something else, blending the vicious with the ethereal." For Entertainment Weekly, David Browne wrote, "Sounding like a visit to an out-of-control crackhouse that sits next to a train station, Streetcleaner should make Stephen King think twice about calling the comparatively tame AC/DC his favorite band." In a retrospective review of the album, The Quietus' Noel Gardner wrote, "It's not going to atomise too many folks' received wisdom if I suggest Streetcleaner is probably the best thing Godflesh ever did."
Streetcleaner has since appeared on many publications' greatest albums lists.
Accolades
Track listing
All tracks written by J. K. Broadrick and G. C. Green. Tracks 6 to 10 also written by Paul Neville.
Notes
- On some releases, tracks 6 and 7 are combined into one song titled "Devastator / Mighty Trust Krusher".
Personnel
Charts
References
External links
- Streetcleaner at Discogs (list of releases)
- Book proposal for a 33 1/3 book on Godflesh's Streetcleaner
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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