Pure is one of the very, VERY few albums in my collection that I find myself coming back to again and again, and finding something new in it every time. Pure is ten tracks that are put together as carefully and with as much force and power as any bunch of symphonies you care to name. Every track is golden in some way. Everything sticks to you. Everything makes you come back for more. The music pummels you, barks at you, and dares you to feel something when everything and everyone around you seems to be determined to make you feel nothing. And in my case, it presented me with images that amounted to a story. I started writing again shortly after that and I haven't stopped since. It has been about a decade since this album first reached me, and every time I throw it on, it never fails to explode with the same thrills that it did the first time.

Like a total eclipse of the sun, Pure seizes the atmosphere of one's entire environment. Stark and unadorned, this is not music built for easy listening pleasure. Instead, one is confronted with lumbering and lurching dirges woven from stripped down and compressed industrial guitar, dissonant sample flourishes and punctuated seismic drum machine discharges. The lyrics are often banal and primitive and seemed more intent upon contributing to an overall ethos of mournful dread, abandonment, and inchoate rage dispersing into a yawning black hole of infinity.

Listening to Godflesh is like gazing into the universe: dark, cold, monotonous, utterly inhospitable, and beautiful. Godflesh taps directly into the primordial dread of death and annihilation that each of us carry and so desperately seek distraction through religion and everyday pursuits that keep one day similar to the next and life tolerably predictable. What is clear is that Godflesh has channeled the soundings of mortal dread and struggle into beautiful music that may not comfort but can empower seeing life and death as they are.