Everyone remember Super Mario 64 for the N64? Remember how you would access levels by jumping through paintings? Pretty cool, wasn’t it? Well, imagine the same, but with album covers. I challenge you to find me an album cover whose world you would like to jump into less than “Streetcleaner’s”, which bears a cavernous, unthinkably huge inferno, set to extinguish a collection of helpless, crucified bodies. This, ladies and gentlemen, is as low as it goes. This is hellishly low.

A few weeks back, I wrote up “Through Silver In Blood” by Neurosis, a bleak write-up for a bleak album. “Streetcleaner” makes it sound like a birthday party. With a heaviness that seems capable of disrupting the Earth from its orbit of the sun, lyrics that come off as if written (and excruciatingly delivered) by someone in an ongoing process of awful brain damage, or at the very least inhuman suffering, and a drum machine that is arguably the most depressive thing here as it seems to bleed out its final, dying and almost lifeless beats, this could makes Joy Division shit themselves.

Yes, the fiction that is reviews of “Streetcleaner” rejects the imagery of slow suicide that “Through Silver In Blood” so effortlessly plays off, instead focusing on the consequences of that. Its primary conceit is centred around dead bodies, often used as peripheral and almost inconsequential decorations, or being used to power machinery that eats and slays more and more people, perhaps in order to power the utterly mechanical riffs of tracks like the horrific opening pair of “Like Rats” and “Christbait Rising.” The tracks in the middle section of the album are droning, relentless epics of guitar noise, and somehow there is a beauty to them! There should be no beauty to this, because, make no mistakes, there is no hope. Once the title track comes in with a marching drum-line and grinding riffs, the cycle of building you up to methodically slice you back down is complete. If you’re used to the hair on the back of your neck standing up when listening to expansive metal, prepare here to instead be weighed down with the weariness of a black hole.

Regardless of whatever price Justin Broadrick sold his soul for to open this particular door, you know it was worth it for the pantheon of arty metal it has since birthed. This influenced everything from the post-metal that sounds so much like his own later Jesu project to the fragmented pop music of Nine Inch Nails, and the industrial strength putridity of “Streetcleaner” has never been matched for sound and style. Albums that cannot be weighed up or genuinely cannot be compared to any other are very rare. “Streetcleaner” sears its own line between itself and all others, a bloodstained line of screaming, society-baiting guitar fire. Consider the streets cleaned at a devastating cost.

by Michael