The Body - I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer

Since 2004, The Body have been crafting strange and experimentally depressive industrial metal, and injecting their signature sound into collaborative projects with bands like Thou, Krieg, and Full of Hell, pushing their boundaries somewhere a little new with each release of their own along the way as well. Marking their musical sculptures of torturous depression and existential darkness with distinctive, incoherent, distorted, high-pitched screams, The Body have always made this mission to sonically embody the verge of suicide as expansively, experimentally and uniquely as possible their core tenet. Yet the duo hit an unexpected high with the consistent integration of more classically metallic distorted heaviness on 2014′s I Shall Die Here, an album that blended the most tortured side of their sound with dense, sludgy, industrial metal beats for something closer to DSBM than simply industrially experimental dark ambient music.

Their follow-up in 2016, No One Deserves Happiness, took pieces of what elevated I Shall Die Here and spread them out over a deeper venture into different realms of suicidal sound experimentation. While on one hand I’m glad the band didn’t try to simply repeat themselves with another album just like I Shall Die Here, the mix of crushingly heavy songs like “Starving Deserter”, “For You”, and “Hallow / Hollow” and more ambient pieces like “The Fall and the Guilt” and extra-genre experiments like “Adamah” both felt somewhat disjointed, and highlighted just how successful of an experimentation I Shall Die Here was.

Nevertheless, No One Deserves Happiness still felt like a respectable follow-up, and though the band’s two subsequent collaborations with Full of Hell saw both bands only putting in just the required effort, The Body established their stance as citizens rather than visitors within the more violent side of metal’s sound.

The duo’s new album incorporates an expected array of new sound combinations, but tends generally back more toward the ambient side of the band’s sound they grew from. While more beat-driven tracks like “Nothing Stirs” and “An Urn” recapture the fire of the band’s trek through depression through punchy, enticing beats, much of the album focuses on incorporation of strings, female vocals (done frightfully masterfully on “Nothing Stirs”), and new industrial drones.

The droning opening of string-and-choir-filled melancholy of “The Last Form of Loving” and “Can Carry No Weight” leads into the welcomed vocal departure on “Partly Alive”, which integrates a more sardonically berating type of shouting that fits well over the more fast-paced horn-and-tom led industrial backing that serves as one of the stronger moments on the album, not to completely dismiss the gorgeousness of the dark ambiance the previous two tracks cultivate. The following song, “The West Has Failed”, is a more clunky, distorted amplifier-drone industrial dirge that seems to take a page from the Sunn O))) playbook, eventually awkwardly integrating an unusual vocal sample that, once all put together, isn’t one of the band’s more thrilling experiments.

The series of beat-driven tracks on the album begins with “Nothing Stirs”, which leads with a catchy distorted bass beat that swells into more horn-backed agonized screams, and the gradual increase of the sinister delivery of the song’s female vocals. Though not as fiery as its predecessor, the black metal vocals and manipulated cymbal crashes on the subsequent “Off Script” is nicely reminiscent of “To Carry the Seeds of Death Within Me” (from I Shall Die Here of course). The subsequent distorted cymbal abuse coming from the burning wood-sounding distortion on “An Urn” calls back even more vividly to I Shall Die Here, and with such an unusually catchy beat. The agonized female shouts near the tail end elevate the song even further, probably to the point if being the strongest moment on the album.

“Blessed Alone” and “Sickly Heart of Sand” form kind of an ambient/drone lull near the end of the album, though the latter track does bring in a bit more life and energy to its finishing moments. But the closing of the album after the tense violins and soprano vocals of “Ten Times a Day, Every Day, a Stranger” is where The Body really impress with perhaps one of the most genuine and tangible examples of their many depictions of suicidal tendencies. 

Finishing with a slightly pitch-shifted spoken word piece on the last track over minimal, yet fittingly defeated piano playing, the speaker of the piece narrates the pain of his own helpless wallowing in self-loathing. He details his avoidance of his own reflection and his lonely, mundane routine and how at every step of the way through everyday events, “everything hurts”. He speaks about reaching “the peak of emptiness” and how the ubiquity of his pain has gently led him toward suicide, only to step back from the ledge at the last moment to simply continue suffering alone. It’s a gripping, and realistic depiction of the type of torment the album and the band’s whole career have been soncially abstracting up until this point, and it’s a subtly shuddering conclusion to the object of what the album’s title suggests.