The Body

The cover and album name might give the game away, but based on the first sonic impression provided by All The Waters of the Earth Turn To Blood, you'd never know that The Body was a duo, let alone a nominally doom-metal-making one.  For approximately seven minutes, “A Body” serenades listeners with the soaring yet mournful sounds of the Assembly of Light Choir.  No guitars, no drums—just 13 voices bending and twisting gently around each other.  When the seven-minute mark is passed, though, a cloud of feedback slowly emerges from the background, growing louder and louder before finally exploding.  At last, The Body play to form: Guitarist Chip King slowly pushes distortion from his amplifier, growling and bellowing his vocals, while a drummer punishes his kit as if he's working on a God-forsaken chain gang. The choir's angelic cries transform into tortured howls.

Of course, The Body hails from Providence, R.I., a city known for giving birth to duos (see most prominently Lightning Bolt) that rarely conform to listener's expectations.  True, they're a reliable and excellent purveyor of the sort of molten, lugubrious metal music that folks like Earth and Sunn 0))) made their own.  But then there's a track like “Empty Hearth,” which centers around a sampled snippet of a church group's prayer.  At first, The Body merely loop the sample while performing their usual grind underneath.  As the track progresses, both the sample and the music beneath the sample are mutilated, as if some Wax Trax Records refugee was given free reign to use the track to relive his industrial salad days. 

And there are the choral interludes, which frequently appear across All The Waters, either exemplifying the calm before the apocalypse or as proxies for the Four Horsemen themselves.  Regardless of how they choose to express themselves, The Body go about their business with the clinical patience of a slow-moving horror movie slasher, watching their prey flail and scream in vain as they inch ever closer to their goal, one tortured step at a time. —David Raposa