The Body

Album review

A complement in ways to their All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood album released earlier that year, 2011's The Body finds the Body's work from a variety of singles, CD-Rs, and similar releases all put together in one handy place. The result is, understandably, partially fragmented in feeling, given that the songs were meant to be heard in shorter formats rather than a unified form, but if the focus of All the Waters is missing, the overall aesthetic sense isn't. Chip King's howled singing and huge, slow guitar work and Lee Buford's similarly steady, often crushing drumming always feel on the one hand like a familiar variation on certain heavy rock tropes old and new, yet taking it all in this way results in making their own approach slowly, steadily stand on its own. Whether it's the use of often angry, politicized discourse via samples set beside the wails of extreme anger and despair (lyrically, musically, or both) or the sheer sense that every song feels hellaciously strong in its own right -- or something more -- the Body's approach rapidly comes across as something not easy to pass off as something done before. King's lyrical and vocal extremity moves from being a gasping black metal/proto-emo howl to something consistently insistent, demanding attention, even as the quick, almost romantic wails of "Night Terrors" or the dim and distant shrieks of "Always Waiting" appear to resist it. Perhaps the most telling selections, though, are the cover versions, mostly due to a 2008 tour EP -- not merely in the choice of source artists but in the unexpected selections and variations. Black Flag's "Police Story" was almost inevitable given the angry sentiments on originals like "Cop Killer" and "Ruiner," but Danzig's "Tired of Being Alive" is more random in contrast. Both get transformed to sound like nothing else but Body songs, as do the other covers -- and none more dramatically than Sinéad O'Connor's "Black Boys on Mopeds," a guest singer steadily fronting the huge, slow arrangement with deceptive calm.

© Ned Raggett /TiVo