THE BODY – The Crying Out Of Things

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  THE BODY
• Duration: 00:36:35
• Available from: 08/11/2024
• Label:

• Thrill Jockey Records

It can generally be seen that in recent years a certain fringe of the more experimental metal, close to noise and avant-garde music, has managed to garner the attention of an audience not necessarily accustomed to the sound of seminal groups and projects, cannot strictly be placed in the context of heavy music.
The success achieved by groups such as Full Of Hell or Primitive Man testifies to a widespread interest in sounds attributable to historical and illustrious names such as Swans, Godflesh, Big Black or Merzbow; many others could be mentioned who are chronologically closer to current events, and The Body now rightfully belongs among the recent influential names. Ours is in fact a twenty-year descent into terror in the name of the most ruthless noise tinged with industrial, sludge and doom metal whose black source of inspiration seems to be apparently inexhaustible.
Strengthened by eight full-lengths and a truly important number of splits, EPs and albums in collaboration with other musical projects, the duo composed of Chip King and Lee Buford delivers us a second album for 2024 entitled “The Crying Out Of Things” following the very recent “Orchards Of A Futile Heaven”, an album created together with the Berlin artist Dis Fig and released at the beginning of the year again for Thrill Jockey Records.
Remarkable is the fact that, in a genre that is in some ways difficult to define from the point of view of stylistic canons and coordinates, The Body have been able to build and define their own identity capable of manifesting itself transversally through music, lyrics and the artworks that followed in twenty years of prolific activity, of which the new “The Crying Out Of Things” can be considered a sort of manifesto.
With their latest album, Nostri give us a comprehensive cross-section of their abrasive but at the same time dynamic, essential yet immense sound: the usual rivers of distortion typical of their productions flood the sustained and sometimes bordering on danceable rhythms of pieces like “A Premonition” or “Last Things”, while a certain r&b inspiration emerges in the penultimate piece of the tracklist entitled “The Building”.
The fifth “Less Meaning” instead presents us with an interpretation of punk music from a perspective close to the most belligerent breakcore music, while “Careless And Worn” gives us some deeply melancholic and at the same time disturbing horn arrangements; The Body's general desire to condense elements from the most disparate musical genres and, in fact, destroy them under the weight of a ruthless use of effects totally dedicated to the expression of the darkest feelings of the human soul is palpable.
It doesn't matter how the lyrics are actually made unintelligible by the distortion applied to King's heartbreaking screams, or how the drum arrangements are often annihilated by glitches and production artifices very close to electronic music, thus making the patterns difficult to recognize from time to time. rhythmic: The Body manage once again to convey in a very clear way what is the characteristic existential anguish of their records, cloaking their vision of sludge and noise like few bands are actually capable of doing.
It is clearly difficult to be able to give news of this type of proposal in an objective manner, but we are certain that for those who already follow the band the new “The Crying Out Of Things” will be an interesting album worthy of attention, even if it does not add in a certainly nothing particularly innovative compared to what has already been achieved by the group. A further consideration can also be made for those who perhaps do not know the prowess of Ours well, where their latest album is at times more accessible than other episodes of the related discography – obviously remaining within the context of a type of music whose coordinates settle in truly difficult and unfriendly territories to listen to.
In summary, The Body's latest album can be considered in some ways a summation of the band's aesthetics, developed over the course of a large discography and now more than ever exposed to the attention of an even wider and wider audience. ready to definitively welcome the experience of a truly particular group and averse to easy and disengaged listening: “The Crying Out Of Things” is in this sense among the most suitable works to introduce the band's sound to those who perhaps still know relatively little the characteristics of a group that has become important in recent years, and it is also a work in which listeners who already know the group will be able to find all the peculiar characteristics of the case.