They did it. They fucking did it. After years of chasing each other around all over the country on endless joint tours and doing absolutely nothing to hide a deep and long running friendship, two of America’s most prominent and innovative doom bands – THOU from Baton Rouge, LA, and THE BODY from Portland, OR, have come together to write the crowning statement of this friendship, a collaborative release in which ALL seven of the members have sat down to craft the most heathen, beastly, monstrous, gutted and worm-ridden doom-sludge album they could come up with, and which is destined to see the light all year. With three guitars, one bass, two vocalists, two drummers and a fucking downpour of smoldering noise hammering away at our synapses, we can’t help but state how enormously fucking scary and heavy this thing is.
The EP immediately kicks off with a total fucking landslide of hideous sonic slime, unraveling on our poor ears the crumbling wall of horror that is opening track “The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills,” an authentic monument to the darkest and suffocating realm of sludge metal and doom bliss. Bryan Funck’s vocals soon roll in with his staple hated bark, and soon enough Chip King’s death screech comes howling in as well, making the hairs on your neck stand up like spikes while the guitars and the rhythm section plow over your beaten corpse in a complete shit storm of noise and putrefied static. “Manifest Alchemy” follows suit, digging even deeper into the bleak and sickening hell-hole the two bands are digging for the listener, and further evolving on the rotten and gory Corrupted-meets-Eyehategod-meets-a-cemetery-coming-to-life aesthetic and tone set by the opener. The Body’s obsession with noise and scraping static tends to take control on this track, corroding it vertically as if someone poured a huge vat of acid over a Melvins song from the Bullhead era.
“In Meetings Hearts Beat Closer” does not fucking let go of the listener’s fears whatsoever and just keeps fucking with them and taunting them even further, inducing in us a scary sense of suffocating claustrophobia. After a Swans-like intro made of dissonance and pounding drums, the guitars then just blow open the fucking floodgates, inundating everything with feedback and static slime, grabbing the listener by the neck and forcing cubic meters of molten lead down our poor ear ducts. The feat is then closed by a weird-ass cover of Vic Chestnut’s “Coward,” a mournful and dreadful march of desperate desolation into the realms of apocalyptic blues, noise, doom and industrial.
This EP will hollow you. It will crawl in your ears, ravage your soul, eat you alive from the inside and leave your hollowed remains trembling on the floor, not knowing what the fuck ever came to haunt you and destroy you. Available now on LP only through Vinyl Rites. Beware.
