Streetcleaner is the debut studio album by English industrial metal band Godflesh. It was released in the UK by Earache Records on 13 November 1989 and in the United States by Combat Records on 7 December 1990. The album was then reissued with a second disc of previously unreleased material on 21 June 2010. The album is widely acclaimed by critics and is often cited as a landmark release in industrial metal; though not the genre's first release, Streetcleaner helped define what industrial metal would become.
Recorded in three distinct sessions and partially refined from pre-Godflesh demos, Streetcleaner is a weighty, bleak album that blends heavy metal with industrial music by means of production-emphasised bass, distorted guitar and, most importantly, machine percussion. Unlike many metal albums, guitar is employed to create screeching noise rather than discrete riffs, and the drums and bass are louder than is typical. Streetcleaner was supported by a series of concerts where Godflesh played alongside Napalm Death, and it was on the North American leg of the tour that the band began to gain significant international traction.
Since its release, Streetcleaner has received a number of accolades and has been performed in its entirety by Godflesh twice (once at Roadburn Festival, a recording of which was released as a live album in 2013). Many other metal bands have cited the album as particularly influential, including Neurosis, Fear Factory and Isis, and Godflesh frontman Justin Broadrick considers it one of his landmark releases. In 2017, Rolling Stone named Streetcleaner the 64th greatest metal album of all time.
Before performing as Godflesh, G. C. Green (bass) and Paul Neville (guitar) played together in a band known as Fall of Because. That group, formed in 1982, were less overtly heavy than what they would become as Godflesh, drawing musical and aesthetic influence from bands like the Cure. Future frontman Justin Broadrick (guitar, vocals and programming) joined Fall of Because in 1984 and introduced Green and Neville to Swans, Sonic Youth and Discharge. Inspired by the dissonance of this music, the group recorded a demo called Extirpate (1986). The songs "Devastator", "Mighty Trust Krusher", "Life Is Easy" and "Merciless" were included on this demo, the first three of which would be rerecorded for Streetcleaner. These early versions were eventually released on a wide scale in 1999 via the compilation album Life Is Easy.
Shortly after Fall of Because dissolved in 1987, Broadrick and Green reconvened without Neville and, in April 1988, renamed the project Godflesh. They released their debut self-titled EP on the independent label Swordfish later that year. That EP, though described by critics as raw and unrefined, is considered one of the originating industrial metal releases and proved to be the foundation upon which Streetcleaner would fine-tune Godflesh's approach to the genre. After the underground success of Godflesh, the band played several shows across Europe and recorded a four-track EP titled Tiny Tears. Before they could release the EP on Swordfish, Godflesh were acquired by Earache Records, and Digby Pearson, the label's head, urged the band to shelve the tracks and instead focus on putting out a complete studio album next. Broadrick and Green agreed and began recording Streetcleaner in May 1989 at Soundcheck in Birmingham and Square Dance in Derby.
The Birmingham sessions saw Broadrick and Green recording and mixing the first half of the album, while the Derby sessions (which yielded tracks six through ten) saw the temporary reincorporation of Neville into the band, this time as a second guitarist. Tiny Tears was appended to the end of CD versions of Streetcleaner, resulting in the album including material from three separate sessions. The entirety of the creative period was reinforced by an Alesis HR-16 drum machine. This choice was at first made out of necessity since Broadrick could not play the beats he wanted acoustically (he described himself as "[not] a great drummer"), but he came to embrace machine percussion and consider it a defining feature of Godflesh. Loudwire called the HR-16, specifically in regard to its use on Streetcleaner, "the most devastating drum machine ever employed". In a retrospective interview, Broadrick described the release as "one of the most alienating albums" he had ever made and referred to it as the band's landmark record.
Musically, Streetcleaner was one of the earliest albums to merge industrial and heavy metal music. It accomplishes such a fusion through combining programmed, repetitive drum machine loops with Green's overdriven bass and Broadrick's distorted guitar. The vocals are sparse, guttural and bleak, and, according to Peter Buckley's Rough Guide to Rock, "misanthropic". Inspired by the harshness of early Swans material, Streetcleaner has been noted for its extreme weight and crushing aggression. Unlike the music of Napalm Death's 1987 album Scum, a release for which Broadrick provided guitar shortly before starting Godflesh, Streetcleaner is exceptionally slow, and the focus is placed on percussion and bass rather than vocals or traditional riffs. The style of guitar playing has been described as abrasive and deliberately grating, and the album is laden with factory sounds, stiff mechanical beats and overwhelming washes of noise. Thematically, Streetcleaner's dismal tone was born from Broadrick's troubled upbringing and from the oppressive Birmingham environment. About the album's desolate fury, he said, "there is a pure nihilism in there. Totally anti-everything. I couldn't come to terms with anything. It was all a struggle, and I just wanted to lash out at every target I possibly could".
"The bass sound and texture, this is an integral part of the Godflesh sound. People often say that the bass is so loud in Godflesh they'll barely find another band [like it]. And that's entirely intentional, obviously."
— Justin Broadrick on the bass in Godflesh.
Streetcleaner begins with one of Godflesh's most well-known tracks, "Like Rats". The introduction of the song, and of the album at large, is a wall of feedback. After the brief noise introduction, "Like Rats" descends into an intense, scathing song with prominent percussion, driving bass and piercing guitar. The screamed vocals, which Consequence of Sound's Andy O'Connor called "spine-chilling" and "some of the angriest verses laid to tape", are harsh and regularly noted for their punchy efficacy. Eduardo Rivadavia of Loudwire called the song "the genre standard", Decibel's Jonathan Horsley referred to it as "anthemic" and Revolver described it as "far-beyond-heavy".
Streetcleaner's second track, "Christbait Rising", has been cited by several critics as another high point of the album, and Decibel named it one of Godflesh's five best songs. While this track does feature a riff-heavy guitar breakdown in its latter segments, it is still dominated by machine drumming. According to Broadrick, the song's beat was his attempt to copy a rhythmic break in "Microphone Fiend" (1988) by Eric B. & Rakim. Luca Cimarusti of the Chicago Reader described "Christbait Rising" by writing, "Drum machines clank and scrape by, creating an eerie cyber-racket, while Broadrick and bassist G. Christian Green lay down impossibly heavy riffs on top. Broadrick's vocals—guttural and processed to sound like some sort of gigantic monster—make the whole thing sound like something out of a nightmare." "Pulp", the album's third track, is entirely built around a locked, repeating, uncomplicated drum loop; Green and Broadrick play over the beats, which completely drive the track. Because the percussion on "Pulp" features little to no changes over its running time, Godflesh occasionally performed extended versions of it where they simply allowed the machine to continue. "Pulp" and "Christbait Rising" were issued together as a promotional single in 1989.
"Dream Long Dead" is Streetcleaner's fourth song. Much of the track puts the squealing guitar of Broadrick at the forefront, but significant portions of the second half descend into heavy, repeating percussive movements where all instruments double the drums. The fifth track and the first recorded for the album, "Head Dirt", displays an unusual compositional structure, with the first half comprising a disjointed, jagged rhythmic loop and the latter half being almost entirely high-pitched guitar feedback. Those swelling waves of noise transition into "Devastator" and "Mighty Trust Krusher" (sometimes listed as two separate songs, sometimes listed as one combined track), the first composition on Streetcleaner from the recording sessions with Neville as a second guitarist and the first rerecorded remnants of the Fall of Because project. This nine-minute stretch is dark, dismal and oppressive, with enigmatic, growled lyrics and sounds underlaid with samples of voices. Ned Raggett of AllMusic considered it, along with "Like Rats" and "Christbait Rising", one of his favorite pieces on the album.
The seventh track on Streetcleaner, "Life Is Easy", is another holdover from the mid-eighties Fall of Because demos. Broadrick's and Neville's guitars clash and scrape against each other, creating eerie cacophony before the bass and drums kick in. The album's eighth song, its title track, begins with a sample of convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas speaking during an interrogation. "Streetcleaner" proper is one of the album's faster, more aggressive songs; as AllMusic's Stephen Cook describes, it "pummel[s] the listener with jackhammer percussion and ultra-demonic vocals", and Charlie Wood of Clash agreed, also calling the drumming similar to a jackhammer. "Locust Furnace" was originally designed as the album's closing track. The song itself is characterised by the drums and bass trading off with the vocals and guitar, and it concludes with Broadrick repeatedly shouting "furnace" as he grows gradually hoarser.
The four Tiny Tears bonus songs (the title track, "Wound", "Dead Head" and "Suction") are Streetcleaner's shortest pieces. Because they were recorded apart from the album, they are compositionally different, more focused on propulsive hard rock riffs and beats than the stark, industrial sterility of Streetcleaner proper. Broadrick employs clean singing rather than growls, and multiple critics have described the tone of the songs as "ethereal". Noel Gardner of The Quietus called the EP a "muscular, enveloping follow-up, and utterly worth hearing". "Dead Head", a frantic song with stretched vocals, even has a tone that Sputnikmusic characterised as almost optimistic. Digby Pearson considered "Tiny Tears" one of his favorite Godflesh songs, and "Wound" would be revisited by Godflesh multiple times on future releases. One such future release, Earache's 1990 reissue of the band's debut EP Godflesh, featured two songs entitled "Wounds" and "Streetcleaner 2". Both are extended songs that have been manipulated and altered, something common for Godflesh. While "Streetcleaner 2" primarily builds upon and distorts "Streetcleaner", it also features deconstructed segments of "Pulp". It is one of Godflesh's earliest tracks to experiment with ambient elements. Another track, "My Own Light", was recorded during the Streetcleaner sessions but only saw release on label compilations.
Streetcleaner was released on 13 November 1989 through Earache Records. In the United States, it was released the following year on 7 December 1990 and was part of Earache's first push into the American market through a licensing deal with Combat Records; it was deemed a success. While the vinyl and cassette versions contained ten songs, the CD release included the Tiny Tears EP as a set of bonus tracks. In April 2010, Broadrick remastered the album and compiled seventy minutes of extra material for a double-disc reissue that was released later that year on 21 June. The bonus disc contained original unreleased mixes of songs from the Soundcheck sessions, live recordings from 1990, rehearsals and demos of some Tiny Tears songs that Broadrick believed revealed melodies that had been lost in the original mixing process. On all releases, the album's cover is a still frame of a hallucination scene from the 1980 Ken Russell film Altered States.
Track listing
All tracks are written by Justin Broadrick and G. C. Green. Tracks 6 to 10 also written by Paul Neville.
- "Like Rats" 4:29
- "Christbait Rising" 7:00
- "Pulp" 4:16
- "Dream Long Dead" 5:19
- "Head Dirt" 6:09
- "Devastator" 3:20
- "Mighty Trust Krusher" 5:26
- "Life Is Easy" 4:51
- "Streetcleaner" 6:42
- "Locust Furnace" 4:45
- "Tiny Tears" 3:25
- "Wound" 3:05
- "Dead Head" 4:09
- "Suction" 3:22
Total length: 66:22
Recording information:
Tracks 1-5 were recorded at Soundcheck in Birmingham,
May-August 1989, without Paul Neville.
Tracks 6-10 were recorded at Square Dance in Derby, May 1989,
with Paul Neville.
Pete Gault – engineering (tracks 1–5)
Ric Peet – engineering (tracks 6–14)
Noel Summerville – mastering
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