The Body are drummer Lee Buford and guitarist Chip King, two robust, bearded Arkansas boys living in Providence, R.I. In press photos, they brandish automatic weapons, some of which are triumphantly splayed on the table that stretches across the gatefold package of their second album, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood. Buford and King cite Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara, and Charles Manson as influences, and, in 2005, they turned Body Count's "Copkiller" and M.D.C.'s "Dead Cops" into sludgy voids on a 7" single. They've appeared on stage wearing potato sacks and nooses, and the cover of All the Waters showcases the pair dressed like ancient hooded Chinese soldiers.
This is probably where you roll your eyes and check out, figuring that these would-be metal/ hardcore/ noise/ whatever tough guys will never sound as bothered on tape as they might appear on paper. Well, you're wrong: Like the best of Eyehategod or Bastard Noise, All the Waters is the rare album that feels truly dangerous. As it crushes and collides doom metal, harsh noise, industrial rock, and gospel singing into one mean mess, it seems to obey no rules but its own. The result is a singular, explosive masterpiece and one of the year's essential heavy exploits-- even if, at turns, it sends you cowering.
All the Waters is an album of detours and surprises. You'll see the Body mostly referred to as a doom metal duo, but don't hang too many notions on that reductive nail. Rather, All the Waters is played by 32 people, including the 13-member Assembly of Light Choir and a score of folks who earn credit not only for keyboards, drums, and viola for but also for noise, sousaphone, and drum programming. Two of these seven tracks begin with slow, controlled, Earth-like riffs-- that is, quintessential, doom metal. Both evolve quickly. "Even Saints Knew Their Hour of Failure and Loss" corrodes its repetitive riff with a piercing din; the choir's gorgeous chant tugs upward against the low-hanging load. Everything disappears except for Buford's drums, a circle of snares and cymbals wrapping the distant chime of a church bell. King's lacerating squeal cuts in, quoting Yeats: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born?" It's music that has more to do with Current 93 than Earth, more with provocation than perfection.
Indeed, after a few dozen listens, the Body's risks and adventures still shock me. Almost uniformly, they deliver songs into chaos. The album begins, after all, with four minutes of beautiful choral singing. The Assembly of Light Choir offers a wordless hymn, harmonies rising and falling, melodies wrapping around one another like the cotton strands of some imagined heaven. Eventually, a voice slips from the flock, her line dropping into a mournful gospel quaver. The rest of the choir follows, their voices dragging and slinking, as if covered with the shadow of an unnamed malice on the horizon. When that beast arrives-- noise swells, shattering drums, monolithic slabs of guitar-- it's the sound of something beautiful being obliterated. Similarly, "A Curse" starts as a ruptured dance number that, a few minutes later, is an arrhythmic, atonal wasteland. "Empty Hearth" begins with a sample of a church group (taken from the strange Sounds of American Doomsday Cults album) offering a prayer; by track's end, their recitation has been chopped and screwed until it sounds like strangles and gasps.
On paper, All the Waters is a grim record, as lyrics outline the failure of science, nature, man, gods, and prophets in pithy bursts. But unless you're reading along, you'll never know any of this. King's strained, unintelligible voice seems constantly at the brink of being swallowed by the sounds around him. Those sounds are troubling enough, recorded and mixed so that the guitars and drums always feel like they're too loud for the equipment and room meant to contain them. The record itself is a smartly designed simulacrum for the lyrics, recreating the sense of impending darkness by creating a sound that swallows itself. The young indie rock bands now using cheap microphones and analog hiss to shape their songs are often criticized for obscuring shabby songs with shabby sounds. The best of those bands, however, use production to reinforce their ideas and give them an extra bit of depth. The Body does just that here, letting rough-and-tumble production add even more anxiety and trouble to seven songs that were bothered as is. Smart choice: All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood is the seldom collapse-of-the-world record that's actually as disturbing as it wants to be.
