Pitchfork
75
Portland-via-Providence duo the Body advance metal in two vital, if not obviously complementary, ways. On their studio albums, they are rare arbiters of outside collaboration: They've brought in the likes of the Haxan Cloak, the Assembly of Light Choir, Robert Lowe of Lichens and Om, Braveyoung, and Thou to expand metal’s capacity for exploring terror and inflicting self-prescribed misery. As a live band, the Body forego experimentation and focus on how far amplification can raise them and test you. Chip King sands you down with both multiplying walls of low end and his voice, a hybrid of Xasthur's Scott Conner's ghostly wails and the bleeding highs of Silencer's Nattramn; drummer Lee Buford is the only drummer with enough force to give aim to King’s projectiles. Choirs, religious speaking in tongues samples, and other details get smothered in the pursuit of absolutely demolishing the audience.
The Body's latest collaboration is with USBM stalwarts Krieg, specifically their mastermind and sole consistent member Neill Jameson. For the Body, it's the closest meeting of their two sides. It's still not quite close to the heaviness of their live shows—when a medium that can capture that emerges, it'll be huge news—but it’s still a convincing document about how both groups see rawness beyond a production style or anti-aesthetic.
Jameson's main contribution to the project is his vocals, which complement and counter King's shrill howl. Where King’s voice can seep into the music like a poisoned wind, Jameson comes through assertively, providing a hardcore edge that is usually more apparent in the Body's live show. He also coaxes rawer work out of them, acting as a pivotal spiritual influence. "Fracture" is a house with some of King’s densest noise walls; the suffocation that comes with them playing a narrow dive bar-cum-morgue or DIY house with feeble breakers has never been so effectively bottled. King and Jameson act as an interrogation unit, switching off each other.
Like I Shall Die Here, the Body, along with Jameson, explore the relationship between metal and dark electronic music. Their cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie" on You, Whom I Have Always Hated has become one of their more heralded tracks, and here, they take on more perverted interpretations of the great electronic and metal clash of the '90s. They warp goth-metal on "Never Worth Your Name", taking what would be a gorgeous synth backbone for Anathema or Type O Negative and strips any and all lust. There’s some form of longing left, the only thing left to trace it back to its source material. There's also a deceptive warmth, something also present on their cover of Sinéad O'Connor's "Boys in Black Mopeds" from the Body’s 2008 tour CD-R. The closest thing to the Haxan Cloak’s touch on Die Here is "Carved Out and Caved In", where distant bells work to loosen the guitar into a noise morass. While this collaboration lacks some of the unity of Die Here, it still has enthralling experiments with electronics rarely seen in metal. And for both groups, there’s always the drive for unorthodox aggression.
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016