The Body & Thou: You, Whom I Have Always Hated

Dissonant noise fiends redefine the term ‘rank outsiders’

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With a roll of the dice manic depressives The Body and Louisiana doom-bringers Thou have spawned something in their native swampland, a malevolent creation staggering from beneath fetid waters to sour the very air upon which its torturous sounds are carried.

The bands sidelined their addiction to Dungeons & Dragons during a recent tour to co-write the vast majority of You… – not a split recording, but a cohesive piece of music effectively combining their rarefied talents.

For The Body, doom has always been a mere starting point on their avant-garde adventures, and on tracks such as Coward this is as ever the case, its reedy, plaintive cries of pain fleshed out at the midpoint by Thou’s notorious heft, defiant anchors of guitar amidst the formless despair. So roams the majority of the album, meandering through bewildering cacophonies, their cover of NIN’s Terrible Lie a familiar comfort mangled almost beyond recognition. A curious exercise in gleefully pulling apart the fundaments of metal and picking over the corpse, piece by agonising piece.

Via Thrill Jockey