Final – 2

For many years now, the name of JUSTIN BROADRICK has been synonymous with savage guitar music - from the breakneck rollercoaster rocket-fuelled post-Punk of NAPALM DEATH to the sonic slaughter-fields of GODFLESH you associate his music with sawtooth chord blasts of raw, unhoned noise, never with subtlety. So with his journey through a less - than - strictly - formed soundscape you might expect discordant, heavy-handedness. What you get instead is an oddly uneven contrast between the beauteous & the stark. At it's best, this album sails close by the dreamscape music pioneered by VIDNA OBMANA - tracks 3 & 4 most closely entering that slow-drift realm. At other times this collection nears a wire-thin version of GODFLESH's own great track "Pure II" - flowing washes of numbed audio sensation, grey wisps and white tendrils, both simplistic and ponderous. At times the music's almost symphonic, in a very Industrial way; at times a gaping vacuum of next-to-nothingness. When you consider that two former of the above mentioned groups - BROADRICK & MICK HARRIS - have explored similar areas, it's strange that there's no mistaking one for the other - whereas LULL roll deep waves of tonal dread across a fusty-warm, almost biological ambience, FINAL choose a laboratory-cultured variation on the theme - a less lulling, somehow more pure dilution of this dark-wave Isolationist ambience. The long track 8 could almost be an extended version of CAGE's 4'33" performed in an abandoned swimming pool with the noise of a busy city street filtered to whining obscurity, bleeding through the walls. "Final .2." is an interesting collection. Some beautiful & dramatic, almost begging to be used on adverts or as incidental soundtrack on films - some so subtle as to be almost absent. A charming, intriguing, contradictory album of warm welcome and cold stark alienation.

Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.