You've heard of The Body, The Body & Braveyoung, The Body & Thou, The Body & Full Of Hell, The Body & Krieg, and more, so it's more than fair to say that the Portland duo has been the hardest working and most productive band in the history of bleak and miserable extreme metal.
The misery comes aplenty these last few months for Chip King and Lee Buford. Last November The Body put out Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light, a collaborative album alongside Full of Hell with whom they've worked together before. A few weeks ago their latest own album I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer. was released on Thrill Jockey, and it was a soul crushing, demented hell of a record; and now a fresh alliance debuts, The Body's joint effort with New York's industrial extremes, Uniform, who are fresh off the release of one of last year's most radical albums, Wake in Fright.
The two parties had joined forces before for live sessions and gigs, and naturally they decided to take it to the next level and document their partnership in the form of a new album, which in all its brevity, is an imposing piece of work which leaves a huge mark on the listener's poor heart and soul.
When those last couple of tracks of The Body's latest individual album sink into the consciousness, the one that frantically cites the LP's title in haunting repetition and the one which prominently features a hair-raising reading of Czech writer, Bohumil Hrabal, who in 1997 fell to his death from a window on the fifth floor of a hospital - similarly to the narration in the recording, those feel like pivotal moments that cannot be easily topped or matched. Yet, The Body returned less than one month later with another work playfully titled after a lyric from Ozzy Osbourne's greatest hit, dragging along another equally forward-thinking band.
The Body's union with Uniform feels and sounds like one of the most grabbing of the many they have indulged in throughout their fruitful run. It can entice fans of both the slow burning sludge metal bleakness of first, and the dirty industrial spunk of the latter. First specimen, Come And See is an engrossing example of what those two dark forces can come up with together, and the forcefulness of their just 27-minute long album.
Mental Wounds Not Healing drops June 8th, 2018 via Sacred Bones.
I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer. is out now on Thrill Jockey.
ZR