By:
Richard Jaspering
Album Type: Full Length
Date Released: 18/03/ 2016
Label: Thrill Jockey
Horns swell as dim, low riffs wash over your mind, drums vacillate
between cold sweetness and strong blows and the stage of chaos is set by the
high screaming voice of unreason, formless yet voluminous and constant. Static
whispers through grating frequencies and primal percussion, augmented by
surprising claps and snaps, urges the dance of a readied, warring people. The Body’s latest is an opus to ecstatic
agony redolent of SWANS and Neurosis’ output. If no one deserves happiness, I
suggest here that it is earned.
“No One Deserves Happiness” CD//DD//LP track Listing
1) Wanderings
2) Shelter Is
Illusory
3) For You
4) Hallow/Hollow
5) Two Snakes
6) Adamah
7) Starving
Deserter
8) The Fall And
The Guilt
9) Prescience
10) The Myth Arc
The Review:
With
The Body’s fifth full-length, on Thrill Jockey,
one is presented an image of a negative plain where a person learns their
contentment, a grace through isolation and self-injurious means. Lee Buford and
Chip King display their pedigree in disharmony through measured, musical
violence and guest Maralie Armstrong (Humanbeast) lends
splendid vocal harmonies to this grim fray of a release.
Our
introduction to“No One Deserves
Happiness” is slow, sterile and beatific with the repeated sung admonition
by Armstrong to “go wait alone.” Horns swell as dim, low riffs wash over your
mind, drums vacillate between cold sweetness and strong blows and the stage of
chaos is set by the high screaming voice of unreason, formless yet voluminous
and constant. Static whispers through grating frequencies and primal
percussion, augmented by surprising claps and snaps, urges the dance of a
readied, warring people. We see, by the title “Shelter Is Illusory,” that we’re at last, at least secure in the
idea that no plan is safe and that what is seen as asylum is only perceived,
ephemeral.
Through
the duration of the songs to follow, a framework for hate’s sake is built on a
foundation of arrogance and contempt, based in vanity and pulchritude. From “For You,” a succinct offering of
searing pitches and erratic, stunning crashes of drums bleed into the next, “Hallow/Hollow,” a mire of the spirit
that ensnares unwary musical travelers where the siren’s song is for neither
light nor dawn. Next, in “Two Snakes,”
sub-bass and concussive blasts of programmed snares assail in tandem in short
form, whipping and pulling into another place of contemplation of punishment
labeled “Adamah.” These two tracks
comprise eight minutes of hate but, when weighed against the other sonic themes
established throughout the record, provide respite for the listener by
affording them a chance to dance for all they’re worth to the weird electronic
rhythms before plunging them into another sub-level of discordant, dragging
metal where horns begin to sound again through the obscuring fog of a track,
dedicated to a coward’s fate.
In
“Prescience,” the connection in one
between a mother’s love of literature and a father’s penchant for violence is
explored, first through a short, spoken-word word piece that clearly, blessedly
delineates the order of a life’s work in pain-causing and absorption of the
same and again through the music, which cleverly establishes the themes in a
sound schematic for sadomasochism.
Finally,
the arcs of the myths of existence are smashed in the concluding track, a
churning lull with choral arrangements and lingering riffs that caps the work
brilliantly, leaving one to regain their senses and return to paralyzing normal
life. The Body’s latest is an opus to ecstatic
agony redolent of SWANS and Neurosis’ output. If no one deserves happiness, I suggest
here that it is earned.
“No One
Deserves Happiness” is available here
