Rhode Island extreme experimentalists The Body make zero concessions on astonishing, apocalyptic eighth album.
Titles don’t come much more apt than The Crying Out Of Things. Sonically, the eighth album from Providence experimental noise duo The Body often feels like some sort of found-footage soundtrack, full of lost souls screaming or sighing in desperation and despair from beneath waves of atmospheric distortion.
Panic pervades every moment of its nine-track run. There is no break in the bleakness, nor any hint of light on the horizon. Waves of dread-filled ambience feel remorselessly fine-tuned to chest-tightening effect. Even amongst their oppressive discography, it is a relentlessly tough listen.
Brilliantly so. Dropped on the week of a United States presidential election which legitimately feels like it could tip the world past the precipice, there is terrifying authenticity and justification to the nihilism here, beginning with the panic-attack percussion of opener Last Things and stubbornly refusing to let up. Removal balances numbed robotic synths, passages of breathless silence and outright shrieking to legitimately unsettling effect. A Premonition toys with and distends the cutting-edge post-rock of a band like 65daysofstatic to tell a story of ghosts in the machine. The rhythmic churn of End Of The Line comes on as a terrifying treatise on habits unbroken and lessons unlearned.
Casuals need not apply. Nor anyone who feels themselves teetering in these uncertain times. Breathtakingly honest as these compositions are, the flipside is that they are cold, cruel and unabashedly hopeless. Moments of melody are sparse, and deployed primarily to accentuate the discord elsewhere.
Even where softness does spill in on penultimate track The Building, it feels nightmarishly disorienting, full of skin-crawling ASMR. Closer All Worries denies even the satisfaction of going out with a bang, sinking instead into five-and-a-half-minutes of suffocating modernist doom: mournful, pseudo-religious chants and howling distortion bubbling away beneath – and eventually consuming – a funereal riff designed to transport the listener to oblivion.
Anguished and uncomfortable as it may be, Chip King and Lee Buford have constructed a brutalist masterpiece, here. Let’s just pray it’s not quite as prophetic as it feels…
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: Author & Punisher, 65daysofstatic, Sunn O)))
The Crying Out Of Things is released on 8 November via Thrill Jockey
