The Body: The Crying Out of Things

On The Citadel Unconquered, one of the many disturbing snapshots on The Body’s latest release, The Crying Out of Things, a male’s voice discharges from the speakers. “The truth is I’ve been in a bad way for a long time,” he begins. “Not wanting to do anything / I had a wife and kids, they meant nothing to me / I have money, means nothing to me / I have life, that means nothing to me.”

It’s this morbid detachment that says a lot of about The Body and the art they make. They are simply not made for this world. One where incessant conflict, power, money and greed overshadows everything else, it’s a world where The Body neither relate to nor wish to exist in. On The Crying Out of Things, Chip King and Lee Buford aren’t afraid to bottle up these times and hurl it like a Molotov cocktail. After all, they’ve been doing it for years, dispensing the kind of radicalised noise that flays skin and smashes bone.

The first of their screaming stormscapes came in February alongside Felicia Chen (a.k.a. Dis Fig) with Orchards of a Futile Heaven. It was a collaboration that fused together Chen’s screams from the void and The Body’s raining hell. Some of that has rubbed off here, of course.

Once again produced by who could be considered an auxiliary third member of the band in Seth Manchester, King and Buford shift the needle on The Crying Out of Things, flailing their burning torch towards new corners.

The recording process itself a first, with Buford relocating from Portland to Providence, resulting in numerous trips back and forth to get the record finished. The disorder of this process is echoed throughout The Crying Out of Things in what is some of the most diverse range of sounds The Body has produced.

Starting with Last Things – a bourgeoning psych-injected slab of dub metal. A tribal awakening as The Body drags their audience into a fresh version of hell. Removal follows through the same fire, albeit slowed down at half-speed. A fermenting, dub stew laced with LSD that is like a reimagination of psychedelia. Similarly on End of Line, where The Body slow it down to a crawl, scraping sonic debris from the same floors Uniform produced American Standard. Metallic noise-sludge that captures the carnage of these times.

Manchester really makes his mark on Careless and Worn with the kind of horrific sound deterioration that is likened to a plane crash caught on tape. So too on Less Meaning, where the producer’s bespoke techniques take The Body’s ideas to the most dreadful places imaginable. It’s these moments that tap into the political nature of The Body. The atrocities in Gaza not far from the thoughts of King and Buford, and it’s framed throughout these recordings.

A Premonition permeates with similar sentiment, but sonically, once again it sees The Body pivoting; this time to the dance floor in what is a new, extreme version of electro noise. Influenced by the above-noted collaboration with Dis Fig, it’s no surprise that she features on The Building. “Wringing hands in worry/ Is nothing,” sings Chen through the smoke of chaos. A ceremonial-like call to arms where The Body haven’t been so direct in revealing themselves.

And it bleeds into closing track, All Worries. Again, a searing indictment on the modern world. Will it ever change? Not in our lifetime, and on The Crying Out of Things, The Body illuminate these realisations as abrasively as they ever have. Sonically, while The Crying Out of Things is perhaps slightly removed from The Body’s previous works, it’s the disjointed nature of it that is its greatest feat, simply because it’s frighteningly symbolic of these times.

The Crying Out of Things is out now via Thrill Jockey. Purchase from Bandcamp.