The Body & Full of Hell "One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache"

The Body just loves doing these albums with other artists. This one is more experimental and interesting than the collaboration with Kreig. The annoying squawked vocals from the Body are still present. The first song is more noise than music though there is a little metal tossed in. The second song is less metal, but more coherent in it's incoherence. The electronic elements are more center stage to the point of making this album sound like a re-mix. There is more of an industrial feel to their cover of Leonard Cohen's " The Butcher". It like the following descends more into clunking and pounding noise.Perhaps if it wasn't for the annoying vocal that the Body contributes I would think of it as a more organic version of what Author & Punisher does. It almost goes with out saying that this is a cover in the loosest sense of the term as it has nothing in common with the original version. It is more inspired by perhaps, but even there its hard to hear any Leon Cohen in this craziness, so maybe the joke is they are butchering the Butcher.

"Himmel Und Holle" sounds like they are throwing there instruments down a spiral staircase, but the industrial beating they give on "Bottled Um" is more to my liking as it might drone on the one riff, but it has more musical merit. They swell this one into a fairly expansive sound. You can hear more of Full of Hell on the raging "the Little Death". A lot here is contingent on what you expect from song writing and music in general. I think the album's strength lies in the places where they touch upon the place that has come about in the past few years where sludge and industrial meet. More often than not these songs drone on the one theme, adding intensity or sonic abrasion to it rather than composing a song that goes some where.  I'll give this one  a 5.5, if you love the Body and have a higher threshold for their tormented chicken noises then you can round it up a point. I think Full of Hell holds back a little here in order to play nice with others.


This is being released March 26th on Neurot Recordings

The Body & Krieg :" the Body & Krieg"

At first I was hesitant on this one because I thought it was a split rather than a collaborative effort  and the only split in my collection I've ever like is Converge's split with Agoraphobic Nosebleed . Even as a collaborative effort I'm more partial to Krieg than the Body, but then it's no secret I like black metal more than sludge. The opener "Bottom of the Bottle , Bottom of the River" lands somewhere between the two with an almost industrial pound that drones more like black metal over the feral vocal howls. The industrial elements do not end with the first song as an electronic beat winds up the darker turn this pairing takes on "Carved Out and Caved In". At around the four minute mark the song breaks down into screaming over white noise when plug gets pulled on the drum machine. It gets built back up into shambling sludge. 'Fracture" sounds like it was recorded through blown out speaker as it's a dirty throb of noise and screaming. More machine like in it's pacing it doesn't feel like industrial due to the chaos erupting at every angle. It ebbs out into cleaner guitar with vocals that sound like the death call of a rooster over it.

The blast into something closer to black metal on "Celebrate Your Shame".  This is similar to the first Corrections House album in that sense that yet again the song takes on a machine like stomp, but is not like Corrections House's second album as it doesn't commit enough to it to become actual industrial. There is a darker more narcotic throb to "Never Worth Your Name". I really like the synth melody in the background, so I try to block out the Eyehategod like vocals that seem to be screaming out of obligation rather than purpose.It begins to slowly build around the two minute mark. At the four minute mark the screaming takes over as the music descends into noise before coming back around. More chaos ensues before the doomy plod of "Gallows" kicks in. Here the noise is used more effectively than in places earlier in the album. Despite the change to the more 808 like beat and the sampled ranting " A Failure Worth Killing Yourself" sounds like an extension of the previous song, aside from the life support bleep in the back ground.

"The Final Nail" has more of a chugging drone to it that falls between their two worlds in a way that is the perfect song to close this sonic altar of madness with. The beat continues to fall on that robotic pound and the layered guitars have a ghost of melody that would not sound out of place on " the Downward Spiral". I am sure this is going to be on the best of the year lists of many a hipster douche pretending to like metal, this is not to take away from from the abrasive power it sometimes packs or the moments when it locks into a crazed darkness and everything falls into place. The vocals annoy me throughout this album, they rarely seem to be going with the flow of the music, so despite some of the nice twisted parts this gets a 7.