I had written a nice three-paragraph, journalistic review of the new Jesu record. I couldn’t decide if I actually liked the review at all. While I spent the weekend waffling over it, Amber put up her review, and I liked it a helluva lot more than anything I’d written. I realized the problem with mine: I forgot to put in anything about how I felt about the music.

Duh.

When I was younger, I lived in a small town in Iowa, isolated from anything but the massest of media. Music was, even then, what I was doing with my life, even if it was just from a listening standpoint. I heard everything I could get my hands on, and I had figured out a lot about what I thought was “standard,” the stuff they always did in songs. When I was very young, I was pretty sure that every song had an intro, a verse, a chorus, another verse, the same chorus, a middle part, and then the chorus again. Maybe, if the songwriter was particularly adventurous, there was another verse before the final chorus, or even a key change. I knew this didn’t happen in classical music, so I figured it had something to do with the words. Luckily, I learned about other types of music and structure before I became Diane Warren, or worse, a poet.

Even still, there were biases I’d built up that were hard to overcome. Pretty music was quiet. Ugly music was loud. And never would they overlap. When pretty music got loud, it became triumphant, or rousing, or something like that. And I never heard ugly music that was quiet.

When I was fifteen, I’d moved to a somewhat larger city, with a decent record store. I was starting to get a whiff of what else was out there. Sonic Youth had opened the door somewhat, but when I was introduced to My Bloody Valentine and especially Medicine, everything changed. Here was the most pop, Beach Boys, sing-along-able melody, buried in this shrieking, howling noise. It was the most wonderful music I’d ever heard. By the time Mogwai came along, I was in college, soaking up Cage and Varese, and remembering how dynamics played such an important part in the Tchaikovsky and Beethoven I’d listened to when I was small. And when a friend at work passed me the self-titled Jesu album, I cheered as another genre from my teenage years entered the mix: metal.

Say what you want about Chuck Klosterman and his writing (and boy howdy, I have a couple of things to say about Killing Yourself To Live, you better believe it,) but in his somewhat pedantic way, he managed to write the most true-to-life book I’ve ever read. That’s me in Fargo Rock City, a teenage male in the late 80’s and early 90’s, unable to even ironically appreciate New Kids on the Block. So I grew my hair out as soon as my mom would let me, bought a lot of Metallica bootlegs, and waited to see where it was all going. Believe it or not, MTV provided the first signpost. One late night I saw a blurry, black and white video by some band called Napalm Death. But then! There was this band called Naked City full of jazz guys that was EVEN BETTER! From there, you could follow all sorts of paths, from the New York downtown ‘81 scene to the Melvins, even towards the ever-lovin’ Fair brothers and another band I’d become obsessed with in the future, God Is My Co-Pilot. But once I got something on my plate, it never really left, and I still liked metal as a genre as much as I liked anything else.

Jesu made sense right away. It was the loud part of early Mogwai songs, downtuned and with less midrange, and sad, sad vocals, delayed and reverbed to hell. You couldn’t make out many of the lyrics, but you could tell they weren’t about sunshine and pussycats. I fell asleep to it most nights on tour that year. When Silver came out last year, I liked it even more. It sounded like a My Bloody Valentine record at 16rpm. It was heavy, sure, but it was gorgeous, a sound you could really crawl inside. I tracked down every Jesu song I could find (for the record: Heart Ache is 40 minutes of dull, but the Japanese bonus tracks on Jesu and Silver are all worthwhile).

Conqueror strips even more metal out of the equation, but it’s certainly no loss. Songs like “Mother Earth” and “Conqueror” sound more akin to Codeine than anything remotely industrial or metal, and are pretty far removed from anything Justin Broadrick’s previous band, Godflesh, ever did. Broadrick is still one sad bastard; “Try not to lose yourself/I’m way past trying/I’m way past caring/I’m way past hoping” go the lyrics to “Weightless & Horizontal,” and they’re typical. But the overall feeling is somehow not hopelessness, but hope, earnest hope. Almost too much, in places; “Transfigure” features such heartfelt post-grunge riffage that the whole thing starts to feel a bit like a joke. The album succeeds beyond that little quibble (which might just be the jaded hipster in me talking, anyway) and is well worth your time, loudly or softly. Preferably with a good set of headphones.

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