What they don’t tell you in books like What to Expect When You’re Expecting is that once babies are actually born, they cause monumental life shifts. While newborns provide a joyous new beginning for everyone in their circles, they also bring about symbolic and genuine endings. There’s the death of absolute freedom, a fundamental transformation of the relationship once shared with the infant’s mother and the realization that your selfish needs are suddenly far down on the list or priorities. On a deeper level, there’s the acceptance that you’ve continued the cycle of life and that hopefully after you die your memory will be kept alive by your offspring.

Jesu frontman Justin Broadrick (also the main man of recently reformed industrial sludge masters Godflesh) understands this dichotomy and has drawn from the sensations he experienced as a first-time parent to create the band’s fifth full-length album Everyday I Get Closer to the Light From Which I Came. “[It] deals with the existential drain that is early parenthood,” Broadrick stated. That explains the abundance of melancholy, soporific soundscapes that billow around the shimmers of life-affirming light. It’s those shimmers that makes parenting tolerable and Everyday so satisfying.

Not that listeners enthralled by the… read more »