All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood

Starting off with a female choir chanting for about 7 minutes, this album might fool a few people into wondering where the crushing apocalyptic doom metal that's supposed to be present had got to. It actually arrives very late in the first song and from then on, it stays. This is industrial doom metal fusion with a tough edge going all the way to the end. The Body duo Lee Buford and Chip King flesh out their vision of bleak end-times despair, in which all major human institutions and belief systems have utterly failed and left us all stranded without hope for a future, with various guest musicians including a female choral group on a number of songs and 8 extra drummers on one track. Other musicians play saxophone, viola, moog synthesiser, double bass and sousaphone among other instruments. The music is usually pitiless and hard-hitting with a lot of black space within the slashing riffs. Screechy background screaming which can get tiresome as the album progresses features as well.

Stand-out tracks include "Empty Hearth" which features a looped sample of two people gabbling in unknown tongues in the manner of Pentecostal / Charismatic Christians overcome with the Holy Spirit, against a crushing bass / drum-heavy rhythm and a rumbling nasal voice drone which may be guttural throat-singing. (The speaking-in-tongues recording sounds like it's from an old 1980s recording that's become a well-known source for sampling; it was originally made by a New Age religious group called The Church Universal and Triumphant Inc., and one of the voices on that recording was the group's leader and founder Elizabeth Clare Prophet who died from dementia in 2009. Unfortunately the CD sleeve for "All the Waters ..." doesn't mention where the glossolalia recording was sourced from but it sounds very familiar to me.) "Even the Saints knew their Hour of Failure and Loss' has a rolling, drum-dominated rhythm and despairing lyrics about the futility of religious faith. "Song of Sarin, the Brave" uses spoken voice samples as an element within the music: these samples add a sinister, insect-crawling unease to the song. Final track "Lathspell I name You" features the nine-man monster drumming ensemble, all thundering as though their lives depended on every beat they hit, and after they finish the track continues with death-dealing scything guitar riffs carving up the black space as female voices groan and keen and a lone male vocal rages in the distance.

Admittedly the music doesn't vary much at all, sounding the same across the album. That might be a deliberate decision as all seven songs on the album rail against human social failures and our foolishness in continuing to pour our faith and energy into such useless structures, so the lyrical unity is very strong. The musicians may be striving for a hypnotic effect with the emphasis on monotonous-sounding rhythmic music. The monotony and the screeching are counter-balanced by the use of samples and those long killing-machine guitar-riff drones and the powerful rhythms which can sometimes be quite complex and seem a bit unusual at times.

Comparisons with bands like Corrupted, Khanate and Sunn0))) will be inevitable as, like these bands, The Body duo go for a droning approach mixed with elements borrowed from non-metal genres and don't hesitate to hire other musicians in different and unusual set-ups to get the right feel and atmosphere, and the right sonic effects and soundscapes for their pessimistic vision. The music is hard and heavy sludge-metal, intense and at times harrowing though nowhere near as unlistenable as Khanate might be. If you are keen on outsider doom metal with some experimental elements but have found bands like Khanate and Sunn0))) difficult to listen to, you should give this second album by The Body a listen: there are interesting fusions here between droning heavy doom and various unusual music elements and styles, and I think The Body have opened up a potential in doom metal for more of this experimentation.