The Body and Thou must get bored easily. During the last decade, both of these delirious doom metal squads have issued records at startling clips, the pace sometimes so speedy it’s as if they’re desperate to outrun the doomsdays of which they so often yell. Apart from a brief pause two years ago, New Orleans’ Thou have offered a few titles a year, many of them splits or EPs that rerouted their sludge through small new capillaries. Despite several dozen releases, they’ve managed but four (intriguing, at worst, and inescapable, at best) full-lengths.
Much the same holds for Providence-to-Portland duo the Body. To date, they too have favored splits or collaborations with pals old and new, instead of records entirely dependent upon their spartan if seismic guitar-and-drums configuration. Since their 2010 breakthrough All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, itself a close hybrid with a hometown choir, they’ve released a few good splits, a terrific EP and only one album, the strangely self-satisfied Christs, Redeemers. Instead, some of their best work has arrived through a full-length collaboration with noise sculptor the Haxan Cloak and now their second of two collaborations with Thou*,* You, Whom I Have Always Hated. It is a match made of mania and menace.
The six-song set is available as a limited-edition record through Thrill Jockey, the Body’s most recent and stable home. The 10-track CD and digital editions, however, warrant the most attention, especially if you missed last year’s Released from Love. That four-song EP captured the two bands holed away in a Louisiana studio at the beginning of 2013. The results are included here not as a prequel but as a necessary companion to the recent arrivals. Those Southern sessions made it clear that this is a painful and powerful fit for complementary brutes. Perhaps because of their economical configuration, the Body often affixes parts that aren’t noise, drums, guitars, or screams to the ends and beginnings of songs. The more versatile Thou, however, allow for more engrained subtlety. During opener "The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills", Thou’s Bryan Funck delivers imprecations in his deep, full scream. Behind him, the Body’s Chip King squeals like a wounded animal, his high pitch offering a sliver of contrast to the mid-range, mid-tempo melee. A later cover of Vic Chesnutt’s "Coward" seems as terrifying for the singers as it does for the listener. In his raspy falsetto, King yells the opening lines like a death cry. The band builds behind Funck as he bellows the chorus—"I, I, I, I, I, I am a coward"—until they collapse in exhaustion around the sound of that last word. A counter-riff adds drama to the stentorian march of "In Meetings Hearts Beat Closer", while mutated bridges afford misdirection to the aptly named "Manifest Alchemy". Thou and the Body could be wider and wilder together than separately.
The new material springboards from that same synthesis. Recorded in Providence during the middle of a shared July 2014 tour, the second batch hits hardest when these two bands land as one. There’s perhaps no better example than their reverent but explosive take on Nine Inch Nails’ "Terrible Lie". The crews reanimate the industrial architecture of the original, with guitars and bass turning the melody into a mess of forceful chords and corrosive feedback. And the beat gets massive, punched down as if both drummers were born wielding sledgehammers. The sound is as colossal as the Body’s but as sharp and severe as Thou’s—a combination that makes the 1989 template feel, by comparison, like little more than a stripped skeleton. Though "The Devils of Trust Steal the Souls of the Free" begins like the Body with more guitars or Thou with more drums, it captivates when King and Funck again split vocals. The song’s commandments, like "Reach out and find nothing," only get shocking when it seems as though the whole world were yelling them at once. The pair slips when the results are expected, as if you’re listening to two bands play the same song at once rather than finesse the parts as one unit. "Her Strongholds Unvanquishable" and "Lurking Free" both stumble toward that mire, if not in it altogether. Tricks that make the Body and Thou’s own records interesting can start to feel like unnecessary crutches when they overcrowd the same shared space.
But those are aberrations for this collusion. Taken as a full-length by two groups that treat the format with some suspicion, You, Whom I Have Always Hated is a remarkably cohesive and singular album. Though it shows signs of both responsible parties, it also proves their inherent restlessness, as they’re both willing to bend toward one another to create something richer than they might have rendered themselves. It’s important that You, Whom I Have Always Hated marks the shortest effective span between successive LPs from either the Body or Thou. Perhaps together, they can continue to avoid boredom.
