Album Review: Christs, Redeemers by The Body

Apocalyptic, experimental noisemongers the Body consistently challenge themselves to make music darker, weirder, denser and increasingly desolate. Their latest offering, Christs, Redeemers, continues this noble work of sonic perversion. The duo (composed of Chip King and Lee Buford) attempt to compose a soundtrack to the biblical Rapture, something that is at once transcendent and torturous.

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At the start of the Body’s new album, Christs, Redeemers, there is a solitary female singer. “Oh child, sing songs of farewell,” she says over a distant swirl of choral voices. Her voice is restrained and beautiful, tense with longing but bleeding out in all directions. It’s a pure moment of bittersweet, achingly gorgeous music.

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The Body create an atmospheric fusion within their sound that brings into question the categories often associated with their signature modes of practice. Through implementing the most imposing bass tones, choral interjections, and meticulously arranged feedback, they are able to channel a number of moods that bring emotive and behavioral responses to the foreground more than any traditional, stylistic signifier. But that comes with a price.

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With over a decade of punishing sounds under their belt, it makes sense that experimental noise/sludge/doom metal duo the Body would want to stretch the limits of their sound on Christs, Redeemers, one of few proper full-lengths in their enormous, often EP-focused discography. Surpassing the smoky Sabbath worship of stoner metal and far too ambitious to fall into the snail-paced drudgery of run-of-the-mill sludge metal, the Body embrace their various extremes over the course of these ten songs, beginning with "I, the Mourner of Perished Days. " The short introductory song builds a burning wall of indistinguishable noise from vocal samples and rattling metal before a witchy female vocal comes in, offering dark lyrics of being set free by the end of life's suffering.

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The Body excel in inducing discomfort. You need not listen to a sole note by the Portland, Ore., noise-metal transgressors to know as much: The press photos for their 2010 breakthrough, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, depicted drummer Lee Buford and guitarist Chip King poised in a window, rifles and binoculars pointed outside in anticipation of incoming targets. The cover of a recent and masterful EP, Master, We Perish, featured a grimacing skeleton bent backwards atop a pile of stone, what’s left of his frame splitting at the midsection.

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