Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The End Is Extremely Fucking Nigh


The Body is comprised of two demonic dudes from Providence, Rhode Island, notable for their big beards, bigger paunches and ridiculous gun collection, who play a particularly dour and dreary style of doom that fuses down-tuned droning dirges, overblown punch-in-the-gut drums and grief-stricken black metal vocal histrionics. They've run with this formula for about a decade, consistently doing it justice while still finding time to churn out extreme metal covers of songs by artists as disparate as Body Count, Danzig and Sinead O'Connor. However, it is on their newest album, 2010's All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, that they have truly come into their own, crafting a collection of songs that are tighter, better constructed and even more brutal than before. The most apparent development in The Body's sound is the wealth of actually tasteful experimental flourishes they've incorporated (washes of noise, tribal chanting, moog, orchestral instruments, etc.), which transcend the superfluousness of the gimmicks many bands masquerade as "avant-garde." The Body understands that change is sometimes necessary, and they wear that change well. The album's first song begins with 7 minutes of all-female a capella choral music (courtesy of the Assembly Of Light Choir), and it only gets weirder from there. Check out song-of-the-year contender "Empty Hearth," the aural equivalent of SunnO))) and Ministry heading out into the night and curb-stomping some Tuvan throat singers.

In the download link I have also included the self-titled record by Dead Times, the totally rad black metal/noise project started by one of the two guys in The Body (the guitarist/singer, I think). Dead Times is the product of a seriously fucked up mind. It sounds like some lonely soul sitting in his basement, meticulously obsessing over the creation of his lo-fi sound collages and then trying to shriek them into oblivion. But, like, I guess that's exactly what it is...

Download: The Body / Dead Times!!

-Aaron

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