ALBUM REVIEW: The Crying Out Of Things – The Body
THE BODY have, and always will be, a force of nature. The sounds they make feel almost like one of the planet’s elements themselves, maximalist in every way, unforgiving and having a mind of their own. Their new record, The Crying Out Of Things, is in no way different from that behaviour but is equally a whole new expansion of emotional ranges that runs wild through their signature take on industrial noise.
With that said, noise is an interesting genre, with its roots firmly set in Japan and has often been diluted down from the genuine product outside of Japan. In the past, small venues that noise is made to be played in haven’t been equipped with the means to let its extremely harsh personality thrive. However, THE BODY aren’t just a noise band, aspects of industrial and metal are incorporated into the mix.
Opener Last Things quickly drowns out any glimmer of light left in the room with dissonant harrowing screams, whilst also paying homage to the duo’s debut EP, reworking the track Die By Ourselves to have a much more maximalist atmosphere to it. You could try and grab the sludgy dub drums of Removal but at best they’d just pass through the gaps in your fingers.
A Premonition continuously sounds a horn, signalling as if the end of something is coming, that angst of an unknown approaching, but with undoubtedly sinister repercussions. An unfortunate coincidence that the album releases just two days after Donald Trump’s re-election, as if the Gjallarhorn of Heimdall has been blown.
The slanting distortions of Less Meaning feel like they could crack the earth open with all the ease of a chicken egg. It goes back to the raw natural force that THE BODY somehow manage to emulate. Perhaps it’s in the fact that really all they make is noise, a cacophony of it at that, the more you listen the more of a monstrosity it becomes. Looking back, it’s a far cry from 2016’s pop tickled album No One Deserves Happiness. Even further, The Citadel Unconquered samples a conversation from the film Calvary, where one character expresses to the priest his troubles and suicidal ideation.
A shift occurs upon listening to the closer All Worries, there’s an immense emotional heaviness that comes with the gothic aesthetics of a distant choir, as if sung by the clergy themselves. Culminating with that harrowing scream that you hear during Last Things shows that the beginning was the inevitable end all along, amongst the drama of THE BODY’s atmospheric skyscraper sound all of the surrealism that they build over the course of nine stellar tracks settles in one place at once.
They really are masters of heaviness, whether that’s sonically or emotionally. THE BODY stands almost above all in a pantheon of noise, up there with other industrial leaning releases of 2024 like UNIFORM’s American Standard and the haunting of COUCH SLUT’s You Could Do It Tonight.
Rating: 9/10
The Crying Out of Things is out now via Thrill Jockey.
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