The Crying Out of Things is the newest offspring of experimental metal/noise rock outfit The Body’s mammoth catalogue. It’s their eighth studio LP, though that’s not counting sixteen collaborative albums, nine EPs, four splits and two standalone singles, bringing their total number of releases to 39 since 2004. Through these releases they have toured various corners of extremity, and on The Crying Out of Things, they produce a dingy, damp record plagued by a constant putrid stench.
‘Last Things’ is the album’s first offering, with a garbled, illegible vocal sample looms ominously over cascading percussion. This spoken word accompaniment is dream-like and haunting, like it’s playing over a Tannoy system in the echo chamber of an empty warehouse. As it falls out, in blare distorting yelps over a churning riff. Horns make their mark, some whimpering out into the onslaught, others offering a triumphant rallying cry. It establishes the sonic palette of what’s to come perfectly; a caustic industrial assault that is as unrelenting as it is miserable. ‘Removal’ has a groove supplemented by electronic pads, as the noise-infected vocals become part of the instrumentation. When the track comes to a discomforting halt, it creates a sense of dread before it returns even more harrowing than before.
‘A Premonition’ is downright threatening. It creeps below the grandeur of heralding grand horns as it builds to a pummelling break that precedes a hip hop beat that undercuts the traumatic vocals with a disgusting groove. ‘Less Meaning’ has a rigid, industrialised rhythm, like stings of static electricity. As this rhythm gets lost in a slow-dripping oil slick of noise, the two lose their individual definition and the track becomes an audio war. ‘The Citadel Unconquered’ has a snare echoed by a metallic keg ringing out into emptiness that perpetuates the album’s grit. The track is minimal and heavy in equal measure, proving that you don’t need overwhelming volume or distortion to be heavy.
‘End of Line’ is one of my favourite tracks on The Crying Out of Things. It sways, looms like a baggy flag battered by smog before collapsing in a controlled demolition, met with an all-consuming bout of depressive rage, smashing a fist into a concrete wall again and again and again in a post-traumatic dirge. It constructs a soundscape of destruction, post-industrial doom and primal aggression that I’ve found hard to shake since I first heard the track. Final track ‘All Worries’ is another favourite, shirking the murk of many of the album’s noisier elements in favour of pensive doom metal instrumentation and choral vocals distantly backing the toxic shrieks. The enveloping, crushing hopelessness along with those choral backings make the track feel like watching a mushroom cloud swallow the horizon from the desecrated corpse of a bombed church. It’s deeply affecting and fitting of the album’s disquieting title.
I’ve found this album really hard to review, not because I don’t know why I like it, but because capturing the sensory reflexes the album offered up is difficult. The Crying Out of Things is a documentation of the unsettling vapid shells of industrial buildings being consumed by mildew, mould, fungus and general rot. It’s the mundane apocalypse of capitalist waste and destruction bottled and fermented, before the stench is unleashed by tossing the bottle against the wall like a Molotov cocktail. This new record by The Body is one I’ve got a feeling I’ll be thinking about for a long while.
The Body: The Crying Out of Things – Out now (Thrill Jockey)
