There's been mucho anticipation for this since it came out a couple of weeks ago, the first collaborative EP between Baton Rouge sludge metallers Thou and experimental sludge duo The Body. Issued as a vinyl-only release, Released From Love features the two bands joining together into a kind of sludge supergroup as they deliver these three new tracks of slow-motion crush colored in Crowleyian imagery, and capped off with an impressive cover of the Vic Chesnutt song "Coward" off of his final album At The Cut, here re-imagined as a kind of funereal, doom-laden ambience.

As the grueling slomo crush of opener "The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills" spills forth, the presence of both bands feels more cumulative than collaborative; rather than being able to pick out recognizable traits of either, the bands have coalesced into a massive grinding force, an avalanche of immense down-tuned riffage and gut-churning bass, tribal drums slowly pounding out their hypnotic rhythms beneath all of the oppressive asphalt-coated guitar crunch. It's not until the two-pronged vocal attack comes in that you can hear the respective frontmen doing their thing, Chip King's strained, breathless howl drifting over Bryan Funck's monstrous growl echoing through the thin layer of black ether that hangs suspended above the pulverizing dirge. The second track "Manifest Alchemy" is more engaging, dropping passages of looping, caustic electronic noise in among the mournful minor key leads and the funereal atmosphere; it's no less heavy than the preceding song though, especially when it slips into the almost industrial-tinged clank and crush that slowly creeps across the final minutes of the side.

But it's the song "In Meetings Hearts Beat Closer" over on side two that really flattened me. Bringing an icy, almost black metal style tremolo riff to the rolling, percussive power that pushes this grim, noise-drenched dirge through the blackness, the bands come together to craft an effective, intensely eerie atmosphere that doesn't let up, even as the song is hurled into the pummeling, Swans-like sturm und drang that drags "In Meetings" all the way down into that final coda of crackling radio-waves and garbled guitar noise. And to finish this collaboration off, Thou and The Body present a harrowing cover of Vic Chesnutt's "Coward", starting it off with a lone guitar weaving it's sorrowful, bluesy song out over the abyss, eventually joined by King's hysterical screams sounding off in the distance. When the rest of the bands kick in, it becomes something both luminous and tortured, the gorgeous guitar harmonies rising like incense smoke curling from a censer. A blast of beautiful, soul-crushing sound.

Released on 180 gram black vinyl in a heavyweight cover with a letter-pressed insert.