Labels: Thrill Jockey
Review by: Alex Deller
The Body are pretty much in a field of one at the moment, and this latest serving is no exception. True to form, their song here is harrowing, bleak and more artful than it has any right to be. It’s 16 minutes or so long and wavers between punishing weight, spuming electronics, death rattle gasps and beautiful female vocals. At one point it seems like things are glitching out, lobbing in a weird, chopped up effect that somehow makes me think of a degraded, Walkman-chewed, nth generation dub of the blue alien singing in The Fifth Element. Christ knows how that happens, but it does. Wonderful, really. From Sandworm I was expecting some sort of parched desert doom. Instead, their spice flows differently: they play foul, aggro, two-man black metal that’s somehow had a Dicks-y sense of clangour attached to the gnashing delivery and horrible, scraped-off vocals. Their songs are short and very far from sweet, complementing The Body’s side of this record in mood and temperament if not style and soul-flattened ingenuity.