The Body & Full of Hell - Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light

After such a wickedly meshed and successful collaboration last year on One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache, it’s no wonder The Body and Full of Hell went in for another session together to exercise the dynamic equilibrium of their respective sounds into a second full-length project. On Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light, though, it seems either both groups expended the bulk of their ideas in last year’s album together or have reserved most of their favorite ideas for solo work. Whereas their first collaborative outing took immediate charge at the listener out of the gate into the open Colosseum with the seamlessly combined power of Full of Hell’s deadly growls and blast beats and the jarring production brought forth by The Body, Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light approaches less directly, bearing a similar yet reduced power of which the element of surprise is being slowly peeled away. In some instances, the bands sound less neatly interwoven as they were previously as they do simply each playing half of a piece of their own at the same time to make a full piece. This is as negative as I can really get about the album, and it really isn’t a bad listen at all, but it hardly comes close to surpassing One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache, sometimes seeming like leftovers from that record. It’s still full of original, progressive industrial production that is to be expected from The Body at this point enhanced by Full of Hell’s beastial grinding death metal fury. What’s good on this record showed itself more numerously on its predecessor, and what’s less good here shows signs of perhaps incomplete investment, rushing, or just the bands being spread too thin around the album’s creation. Still full of unique heavy sounds worthy of attentive repeated listens, it just sits a shelf or so underneath their first collaboration’s product.