Here's the recently reissued 2004 self-titled album from Providence art-sludge duo The Body that came out on At A Loss, keeping the same digisleeve package design as the Moganono edition, but now boasting a new mastering job. Here's my old write-up for the original release of the album...

I had been hearing good things about The Body and their self-titled album, but it took awhile to finally track this down and dig in. Based out of Providence, Rhode Island, The Body is two guys named Chip and Lee, one drummer and one guitar player playing through a wall of amps, and they are freaking heavy. And kind of enigmatic, too. Their website doesn't tell you anything...it's just a old-looking, sepia-toned photograph of two guys on a hill in the distance, wearing potato sacks over their heads. That's it. And the band's Myspace page isn't that much more informative. Which is kinda cool. Definitely lends a weird, mystical vibe to The Body's pummeling sludge. Musically, for one reason or another I was expecting this album to sound like some sort of Melvins knockoff, but that's not what this sounds like at all. Nope, this seven song album is a weird mixture of super heavy, repetitively droning sludgecore, ferocious jangly balls of mathy riffage, and strange vocal samples and other noises moving around in the big, murky fog these guys whip up. The first track is an untitled nine-minute dronefeast, huge drums and monochord sludge riffing lumbering through a thick haze of rumbling feedback and growing in volume and intensity until the entire performance begins to become more and more distorted and blown out, eventually turning into a crunchy blast of ripped-speaker overload and buzzing drone. Then it abruptly kicks into "The City of The Magnificent Jewel", with a massive grooving riff and slightly faster, churning drumming, playing the same droning hypnotic riff over and over, tied together by insane sounding, desperate shrieked vocals that are way off in the back of the mix. The rest of the disc alternates between slo-mo pummeling sludge and strange detours into math rock; parts of this remind me of the metallic mathy crush of Conifer and Tides, but those wrecked screaming vocals and the odd atmosphere that permeates the album definitely make this stand out. Dig the last track, too: a fifteen minute long descent into hypno sludge dementia, huge pounding monotono-riffage bashing your skull in right before it disappears and the sound of singing children enters the room, then rushing back in as a churning, chaotic dark riff grinding over and over and over, lulling you into a uneasy trance until disassembling into a spacious field of upright bass tones (and I swear I hear violin in there...) and roaring droning feedback.