He’s a Brummie and has had such ridiculous labels as ‘avant-pop’ and ‘avant-garde doom’ used to describe his music of the vintage of this album, but one thing about Justin Broadrick which cannot be in any way derided is his musical diversity: to have gone from the doom/industrial metal of Birmingham’s Godflesh to the post-metal of earlier Jesu releases to the (oh god) ‘avant-pop’ of this release truly takes someone to whom remaining in a niche means nothing; someone to whom the art is everything and consistency but a crippled runner in the one-hundred metre sprint that is his sense of priority. The opener Don’t Dream It effectively ensures that former Godflesh fanatics are to feel disappointed, if not in some manner betrayed: M83-esque chanting of the phrase ‘don’t dream it’ replaces the former’s more feral fare with an enchantingly daring aplomb; and this chanting finds itself accompanied by dreamy piano amidst a sea of thick bass drums and distorted guitars.

Can I Go Now? takes traditionally electronic synthesised drum patterns and mates them with a second round of shoegazing vocals reminiscent of those of My Bloody Valentine. This hallucinogenic meld of the organic and the synthesised creates an atmosphere conducive to the best of ambiances: a laid-back feel with somehow intellectual overtones; perfection in its ascent from this delicate simplicity to a slightly more voluptuous texture with the addition of Jesu’s almost trademark distorted guitar tone. Track three, Wash it All Away, opens with an increased sense of urgency: a greater tempo with more dense instrumentation. Here, a bassy percussive backbone guides the highs of a synthesiser into a symbiosis left undiscovered in much music: trebly tones and bassy tones combining without messiness. Two-tone guitar repetition carries this song to its end with effortlessness amongst the hazy backdrop of instrumental synergy.

A darker tone is set by synthstrings in the leadup to the chugging start of The Playgrounds are Empty: that ‘Jesu-and-Jesu-only’ tone of bastardised guitar finds its home once again in the wake of Broadrick’s wafer-thin voice; almost a shadow of itself in the chaos that is the plodding rhythm of guitar chords. The distortion is coupled with clean guitars as the song continues, with a more viscous percussive line rearing its head delicately in the bridges between verses. Dummy is a song reeking of Sigur Ros meeting Explosions in the Sky in a former industrial town: objective beauty corrupted by a the dreariness of the vagaries of life; truly, music of the people.

Supple Hope starts with the helical, almost hypnotic swaying of trebly guitars with only the introduction of an addictive bassline serving to disrupt their cyclic beauty. Vocals, once again, lie at he lower end of the audible spectrum and are very much used for their instrumental timbre rather than their lyrical content; and it works deliciously. These build to a climax Godspeed You! Black Emperor would be proud of by the four minute mark, and slowly fade to fragile ambiance once again soon after. Tiny Universities suffers from the complex of almost being Saturdays = Youth era M83 by numbers, and it really does lower the tone of the beauty of the song; especially given the very apparent amount of care which had gone into it.

Luckily, the end of the album is saved from unfavourable claims of emulation of other artists by Plans that Fade, a shoegaze-meets-post-rock-meets-electronica song which is something all of its own. Trance inducing and mind-unwinding, its simplistic guitar lines create the perfect atmosphere for work or play, and borders upon an experience of a spiritual nature. This song is truly a peak in the work of Broadrick and in Jesu’s back catalogue. Though th album may repeat itself in some of its sections and themes, each song is a piece of musical mastery large enough for any such feelings to be overcome by the sheer awe felt in the presence of the exposition of Broadrick’s genius.

As He Climbed the Dark Mountain confirms any thoughts of a new outlook on the part of Thursday: faced-paced, technical riffing intertwined with expeditious drumming makes Rickly’s trademark rasp stand out more than ever. It’s raspy again: it seems that they’ve left behind the post-production excesses of their most recent work and it really is better for it. Track two of Thursday’s four is the somewhat more experimental In Silence. With an introduction smacking of the likes of Jesu with its synthesiser-meets-droning-ambiance-of-guitars dynamic. This is like no other Thursday song released before: it’s fully instrumental and borders upon the definition of musically ‘epic’. It wondrously leads from the aforementioned droning amidst synthesisers into a piano chord-bashing exercise, only to rise again to the heights of a tremulous soundscape almost aping the work of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. An Absurd and Unrealistic Dream of Peace begins hauntingly: barely audible piano and guitars raise hairs which are only to be flattened seconds later by the violent progression of distorted guitar chords to come. Once again fast and technical, the instrumental work here is beyond simply ‘impressive’, it’s standard-setting for bands within Thursday’s peer group. Appeared and Was Gone is another instrumental song, this time with piano leading a march into the deepest of electronic noise experimentation: we climax with nothing short of sonic cataclysm. This is not typical Thursday: this is an evolved, matured Thursday; somewhat ironically looking back to their earlier works of Waiting and Full Collapse for inspiration.

Envy’s half of the split is just as impressive. An Umbrella Fallen into Fiction is as progressive as anything by Envy: a four-minute, low-key introduction mixing electronic and ‘real’ instrumentation with the soft-spoken monologue of Tetsuya Fukagawa leading to a passionate explosion of screams amidst a background of swirling guitars. And it still works. It’s still surprising. That guttural, visceral exhalation is still as passionate as it was on Breathing and Dying in this Place. Isolation of a Light Source is more direct: the pretext of an introduction is done away with and immediacy takes its place. Divine riffs cross with incomprehensibly quick drumming to form a whole which embodies the spirit of the band’s music: technical, whilst not devoid of feeling; the anguish in Fukagawa’s voice is truly discernible. Pure Birth and Loneliness takes a step back in terms of tempo, whilst providing the same softly-spoken and tremolo picked delights of Japanese rock, as well as the throat-exercises so resplendently executed. Nothing is an excess: it’s all essential, from the scream-talk dichotomy to the soft-hard ascensions of instrumentation.

This split is the best that I have heard all year, no mistake to be made about it. Through this collaboration, Thursday really have gone back to their better days, and Envy remain as consistent as they always have been. It’s thirty-three minutes of stylistic exploration by both parties, and it really shows: it’s something different from both bands’ back catalogue, and a will to play around with ideas surely only has positive connotations for the futures of both of these bands.