During a interview about another album his prolific and genre-flouting metal duo The Body had just released, drummer Lee Buford decided he needed to clarify something about the pervasive bleakness of his band’s work: it's "negative, but...a hopeful negative." Not that you'd be able to tell any of that uplift from the curdled sound of the record he was ostensibly there to talk about. Its title was No One Deserves Happiness and its sound matched the sentiment. But traditionally Buford and guitarist Chip King have used their many collaborations (in the past two years alone they've made full lengths with Thou, Krieg, Vampillia, and the Haxan Cloak) for something a little more fun, relatively speaking—a chance to at least stretch the boundaries of their slow, sickly grinding compositions into unfamiliar territory.
That was never really an option when making a record with the Maryland grindcore four-piece Full of Hell; the two groups share too much in common. The Body work in textured, patient torture, death by a thousand cuts, whereas Full of Hell operate more like a woodchipper—but they’re united in the all-consuming gloom that consumes all of their best work. Bearing a title culled from one of Courtney Love's most famously vindictive proclamations, One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache is a document of the overwhelming power of depression. It's not life-affirming, as Buford seems to argue, but the sheer force of the sound makes a compelling argument for diving into the black anyway.
And that’s sort of what they do. From the record’s opening moments, a subwoofer-rumbling kick drum and a snare trace the edges of an abyss before Full of Hell vocalist Dylan Walker’s steel-wool vocals give you a shove. The effect, especially as it bleeds into the sample-apocalypse of “Fleshworks” is something like standing uncomfortably close to a late-period Rothko canvas—the distressed blues and blacks expand to fill your whole field of vision and any shifts are more textural than tonal. It’s one-dimensional in the same sense that those final paintings were, fixated on the void in a way that’s emotionally affecting—monomania can be compelling, after all.
Throughout they’re taking risks, abandoning straightforward metal trappings to pile noxious noise blasts on shredded 808s (“Bottled Urn”) or turning Leonard Cohen ballads into doom-metal dystopias (though the hypodermic fantasies and Christian imagery on Songs for a Room’s “The Butcher” make that a pretty easy task). But even as they explore alien aesthetics, the Body and Full of Hell are constantly finding ways to uphold the spirit of each other's work. They’re united in their disposition, up until the record’s final moment, a sample of the HBO movie You Don’t Know Jack that seems to sum up what precedes it: “Loss, loss, loss, loss, loss.”
