The Body at Vacation Vinyl on Sunday September 18th, 2011
Saying that the duo called The Body is loud would be an understatement, these guys probably want to crack the earth in half with Lee Buford’s pounding drum beats and Chip King’s distorted roaring guitar.
Their eardrum-destroyer-noise-metal may be scary because of its powerfulness and its potential to make a room vibrate as if the space shuttle was taking off nearby, but these two hairy bearded guys from Providence, R.I. didn’t look that frightening when I saw them performing at Vacation Vinyl on Sunday afternoon.
Their sound was sinister and doom, with a sort of metallic throbbing noise that sounded like a death sentence before an execution, not the kind of music to trigger happy thoughts, but rather to put the most optimistic person in a very dark, dark place. Chip King was screaming the whole time during these gloomy, harsh and long numbers, yelling indecipherable lyrics lost in the loudness and the distortion, but the whole scene was adding even more despair to the situation.
The atmosphere was heavily repetitive with slower parts followed by some explosive tempest-like noise, so chaotic and loud I was having a second thought about being so close to take pictures.
But listening on line to some tracks from their second album, ‘All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood’, a complete program, right there, in the title, I realize there was more to the story, as there are some parts sang by the Assembly of Light Choir, a church-choir-like on ‘Even The Saints Knew Their Hour Of Failure And Loss’ for example or even prayers, litanies on ‘Empty Hearth’, which were crushed and were disappearing into the terrifying doom noise.
One last thing, on the cover of their album, the two are dressed like ancient hooded Chinese soldiers, but at Vacation Vinyl they were just wearing kakis and t-shirts, some regular guys not exactly dressed up for the apocalypse their music seemed to announce.
Unfortunately, the video does not serve their sound very well,… it was just damn too loud!!
