Customer Reviews

In All Languages

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No one has bothered to review this yet??? This is HUGE. If you are reading this, you have an interest in heavy music...look no further. A bit on the industrial side, this two piece sounds like the plates of the earth in shift. One disc of "best of" material, the other rare. Track one of the rarities, "Love is a Dog from Hell" is worth the price alone...crushing riffs, pounding bass in sync with a drum machine...primal. There are moments of beauty to be found on here as well...the hypnotic "Flowers" being one of them.
The "StreetCleaner" album is considered a classic, and rightly so...one listen to "Like Rats", and you'll hear why...
After the earache years (which this collection encompasses), Godflesh went on to record their last album for Koch entitled "Hymns" as a three piece, featuring Ted Parsons (Swans, Prong) on drums...they broke up shortly thereafter. This is unfortunate, for they were onto something good...

Like the author of the first review for In All Languages, Godflesh's career retrospective, I am amazed by how overlooked this album is (at least on Amazon). Being a recent convert to the band (I bought this album as an introduction about 18 months prior to this writing), I am by no means an expert on the group, but thanks largely to this double disc collection, Godflesh have quickly become one of my favorite bands. I decided to give them a try after reading how many of my favorite drone metal bands--especially Isis--cited them as a reference. Now I can say I believe the hype, and then some, and I really have In All Languages to thank for getting me into the rich musical experience that is Godflesh.

Justin K. Broadrick, how do I worship thee? Let me count the ways.

A band like Godflesh is unique because their material is highly influential on the extreme/drone/post-rock scenes that are exploding today, but they weren't considered very successful in their own heyday. Yes, they were 'ahead of their time', but the songs collected on In Languages are all still potent enough to enjoy today. Without Godflesh, Isis and their growing number of drone metal followers may very well not exist.

Professional music journalists have a tendency of misfiring when they label Godfleh's sound or musicial genre. This is probably because during the years of their existence, the band walked the line in many different sounds and scenes. First things first, they are NOT grindcore, but because Justin played guitar for the first half of the first Napalm Death album, they are habiutally mislabeled as such. Godflesh, over time, have synthesized a unique recipe of heavy metal, grunge, drone, trance, ambient, noise rock, drill n bass, and other genres to make it hard for anybody to put their finger on. Although they are hardly the definitive band in the industrial genre (which is a good thing), I tend to think of them as the cream of the experimental industrial crop. Is Nine Inch Nails too moody or poppy? Rammstein too drab or Kraut for you? Does Ministry feel too repetitive or...stupid? Try Godflesh and be amazed!

One thing this collection accomplishes admirably is demonstrating the spectrum of Godflesh's musical evolution over the years. Disc one is the real retrospective, culling all of their 'hits' (note: US listeners will probably not recognize any of these as hit singles, since the band is more or less a cult classic outside of the UK). Starting with early, highly influential material such as "Like Rats" and the immortal "Streetcleaner" and ending with songs that would predict the work of Broadrick's next band, Jesu, disc one is a timeline of Godflesh's material, and it just gets better as it goes on. Winding through song highlights like "Xynobis", the danceable groove of "Crush My Soul" and the eerie, brooding "Mothra", this collection has the most essential tracks of the band's career. The last five tracks on disc one feel sort-of like a Godflesh 'hangover' to me (if you'll allow such an inane analogy), because they take the oppressive nature of Justin's excellent guitarwork and infuse it with sadness, yearning and loneliness. In short, the material goes from being just sonically heavy to genuine emotionally weighty songs, a sign of things to come for Godflesh's final album (Hymns) and Justin's aforementioned post-Godflesh group, Jesu.

Disc one would be worth the price of admission alone, there's really not a dull track to be found. "Avalanche Master Song" and "Spite" are a little too repetitive to be catchy, but literally every other song has a riff, drum break, or other refrain that is bound to get itself lodged inside your head for months afterwards. It's the rare band retrospective that is both consistent enough to listen to from start to finish, but with enough changes to make it exciting, and give each track something special to take notice of.

The second disc of the collection is slightly different. The obligatory collection of b-sides and remix tracks that are usually thrown in in this type of 'best of' package, there isn't much to write home about here. It gives something for die-hard Godflesh fans to get excited about, but me being a new fan, not much on the second half could sustain my attention. However, some tracks are either memorable or surprising enough to mention here. For instance, the included extrapolated versions of "Crush My Soul", "Slavestate" and "Xynobis" are, in my mind, of equal interest as their original, more succint mixes. Mellow, electronica-influenced tracks like "Flowers" and "Empyreal 2" show off the band's more ambient side, and help to 'flesh out' the spectrum of the group's songwriting capabilities (no pun intended). Generally speaking, the songs here are too long, repetitive, or just plain dull to keep my attention for long. Overall, disc two seems very padded to me, and I very seldom can stomach all 13 tracks at a time, but it does have some interesting odds and ends thrown in, especially for established fans of the band's work.

In terms of aesthetic and sound, I would say Godflesh's closest musical 'relatives' are bands like Can, Isis, Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, early Soundgarden, late 80's Cure, and Earth (I said they were diverse). Fans of the band may be interested in Justin' innumberable side-projects, including Jesu, Final, Techno Animal, and Napalm Death, if you're in search of heaviness of a different color.

When considering what both discs have to offer, in spite of the somewhat malignant nature of disc two, this collection is really a top notch look at an amazing band. If you haven't heard the band before, this is absolutely a great place to start (it worked on me!). Godflesh are one of those bands that, after listening to this album just once, I immediately wished I'd discovered years beforehand. If you're into heavy metal, drone, and/or electronica, chances are, you'll feel the same way. I can't recommend this collection highly enough, get it now so you can be proud of yourself sooner!

Out of most of the bands on the Earache label, Godflesh is one of the best, tied with Napalm Death and Carcass. This is much different than expected. I thought this was just going to be death-metal-meets-grindcore. Nope, it's way different from that. It's good industrial metal, and I love industrial metal. This stuff is amazing. If Fear Factory were to have at least one influence, it would be Godflesh. The best tracks on this classic are "Xynobis", "Crush My Soul", "The Internal", "Circle Of S**t", "Mothra" and "Like Rats". One problem is that they didn't put "Christbait Rising" on there. If you like really dark metal mixed with industrial, you will not go wrong with Godflesh's CD.

This is my first foray into the industrial realm of music. The closest I have come is Fear Factory and Arcturus. Other than those two, everything I have is either death metal or black metal. So I didn't have any expectations listening to these two albums. The only thing I knew about Godflesh was that they were the innovators of the industrial genre and that their best albums were Streetcleaner and Pure.

At first, listening to these cd's was a chore. I kept waiting for everything to explode and then start jamming. It never happened. A lot of the songs are very repetitive in that the riff just repeats itself and the same lyrics are repeated. However, the highlights were the songs from Streetcleaner, Pure, and Us & Them, I thought.

Godflesh followers will probably like the second disc with remixes since they already have everything from the first one. But me being new to Godflesh, I found the first disc to be better. It took quite a while to sit through the entire second disc.

Will this retrospective convince me to buy Godflesh's back catalogue and the new Hymns in the future? Probably not. Will I search for other bands in this genre? No. Is this a worthy purchase for someone looking for something different and challenging? Yes. Are the two cd's good music? Definitely.

Not much to add as I agree with the other reviews. Its a decent cd if you are new to the band, although I would just tell you to buy Streetcleaner and start there. Disk 2 may be interesting for existing fans like myself that have pretty much everything, but there isn't much there that isn't fairly easy to find. Except for 2 remixes from Us and Them which are quite decent and apparently unreleased, and Love is a Dog... which is a track well worth having. The Crush My Soul remix is an edited version off the CMS E.P., so you should still buy that EP if you ever see it for that and the Xnynobis Dub remix. The two Peel sessions tracks, particularly Pulp, are a great addition, I'm glad to have heard them. Newspite is a great remix off of an Earache comp, well worth the listen.The other remixes are on alblums you would already have, nothing new there.
On disk 1, the "remastered" Pure tracks are actually not really improved and I think they may sound worse. Sounds like they were just spatialized to make them sound wider and consequently thinner. Couple of tracks e.g. Like Rats are a bit edited in the intros and outros, the fades are bit sharper. Not a major deal though.
The only reason to buy this alblum except for the above mentioned hard to find tracks is if you want to listen to a medley of 'Flesh and you don't want to carry all the CDs with you. You decide if the price is worth the convenience.

i'd say i'm disappointed, but my expectations weren't very high to being with. this "anthology" is so transparently a last-ditch attempt by EARACHE RECORDS to squeeze whatever pennies they can out of Godflesh's back catalog. even the packaging and the liner notes feel thrown-together and poorly thought-out. why buy it at all? because, for one thing it DOES have a nice clean master of the Peel Session "PULP," with Kevin Martin (Techno Animal, GOD, ICE, THE BUG et al) guesting on treated saxophone. this was a real moment-- a great and truly inspired performance by all involved, documented by John Peel. other rarities include the well-known "LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL," a few remixes and......that's about it. most of this stuff (even DISC 2) is available elsewhere and isn't even that rare to begin with. it's obvious that the purpose of this anthology is to sell more records (as opposed to actually documenting the trajectory of one of the most interesting and diverse 'rock' bands of recent years); the overall picture of the band that one walks away with is pretty conservative and pretty limited. save your $$ and buy the new Techno Animal instead.

If you're anything like me, the nu metal craze that's been goosesteppin' its way across the nations is a nightmare from which you are trying to awake, and the mo' money mo' problems jiggy-rap world, cleanly throwing its cash in your dirty face, puts you dreamlessly to sleep.

Need a wake up fix of ultra-heavy guitar music and skull-crushing beats? -- look no further than Godflesh, one of the original bands that brought the two together, minus the bullsh*t commercial factor. You should have no trouble waking up completely from your record industry nod in the presence of their music.

In All Languages, a double CD retrospective anthology covering selections culled from Godflesh's discography since their breached birth in 1988 -- except their swan song album Hymns (which was released just after this anthology) -- testify to the potent virulance of their musical vision and the years of sonic mastery accomplished. More modern music than we might realize has been directly or indirectly infected with their overpowering strain. . .you're probably already sick with a debilitating imitation of it, and just don't know it; no names.

Marrying the influences of Throbbing Gristle's ambient noise, the sludging heaviness of Cop-era Swans, Killing Joke's rhythmic complexity, and the buzzsaw blues of Black Sabbath -- Godflesh's dark and ferocious body of work became the benchmark and blueprint for the grindcore movement -- that's right, the heaviest of the heavy. Toss into this noisy hydra lyrics that passionately take up Nietzschean values decrying a betrayal of personal independence for the thumb-sucking "herd mentality" and you've got Godflesh's basic thrust.

I guess hailing from Birmingham, England, where Black Sabbath were born and bred, gave them a predisposition toward music that lusts for the ever-harder, ever-louder. Vocalist/guitar strangler/beat manipulator Justin Broadrick and bassist G.C. Green, like their hometown forefathers, show a similar capacity to take stripped down guitar riffs and pack them dense with so much life, you can almost hear blood running through them. And Green, not to be minimized, has one of the most distinct bass sounds in rock -- imagine a humming tanker truck scraping the wall of an underground tunnel and you can begin to approximate the impact of it. Add the powerfully cold and precise big beats of Broadrick's drum machine, or the "inner city" breakbeats he samples, and the sound will crumble you like a detonated building. They even throw a live drummer into the usual undertow during the Songs Of Love And Hate-era tracks, as well as the not included Hymns material, to beat down your already pummelled perceptions to powder, as a jackhammer bonus.

What are you waiting for, a painless invitation?

I have been a GF fan since a buddy of mine gave me his Streetcleaner CD back in 92. If you favor Streetcleaner, Pure and Selfless, then go out and get this CD. The remixes alone are worth the price of this 2 Disc set. If you prefer the 7 minute durge Goflesh over Techno Animal-esq Flesh, you'll dig it.

Well, in the case of Godflesh, you can't really call this a "greatest hits". What hits? "In all Languages" is a great retrospective of Godflesh's music, though. This CD would be great for a Godflesh novice, who may have heard of the band, but not know much about them. I can't argue with the track choices (especially since my favorite song, "Flowers", is on disc 2).

Disc one is all previously released, but disc 2 has a couple of surprises for any hardcore fan who wants to buy this CD to complete their collection. Also, if you've been a Godflesh fan since the Streetcleaner days (as I have), it's great to put on disc one and listen to the subtle evolution that the band's sound has gone through. I have every Godflesh disc (except for that elusive "Crush My Soul"), and I still feel that this CD was a worthy purchase.