Each new release from avant-sludge duo The Body sees the band exploring new facets of their sound, experimenting with tone and texture while continuing to root their music in the agonized slow-motion heaviness they unveiled with their self-titled 2004 debut. From collaborations (both live and in studio) with all-girl choirs, to big-band team-ups with the likes of majestic doom metallers Thou, to this recent collaboration with dark UK electronica artist Haxan Cloak, The Body have expanded the boundaries of their music more than most bands of their ilk, reshaping their jagged, molten sludge into ever darker and more adventurous forms.

Teaming up with British artist Bobby Krlic (aka Haxan Cloak) to produce six crushing tracks of mutated black electronics and skull-pulverizing sludge metal on I Shall Die Here, The Body have rarely sounded quite this terrifying. Each artist's fingerprints disappear into the mix; the opener "To Carry The Seeds Of Death Within Me" evolves from terrifying, minimal electronic shrieks that resemble the eerie whistling cue from Brad Fiedel's score for Just Before Dawn, into a droning, pulverizing sludge riff carried on saurian tempos, the sound streaked by strange processed screams and pulsating bass tones, shifting into a minimal, almost Kompakt-like technoid throb. From there, the album move further into heavily processed metallic crush, shifting into massive sludge-encrusted dubbed-out heaviness, echoing snares snapping beneath the weight of the severely down-tuned doom riffage, the music breaking apart as creepy vocal samples suddenly take over, or dissipate into stretches of minimal ambience. Chip King's high, blood-curdling shrieks are as panicked as ever, even as the music transforms into a swirling mass of distorted synthesizers and murky processed drum loops, or erupts into a wall of thunderous martial drumming and tribal rhythms. And the disembodied tectonic riffage of "The Night Knows No Dawn" is as massive and earth-rending as anything from Corrupted or Sunn 0))), but that monstrous glacial guitar-churn gets caught in a swarm of thin crackling glitchery and distant choral drift that transform into something much more otherworldly.

The music that follows gets even stranger, those shrieking electrocuted shrieks sounding out over blasts of fractured bass-heavy electronics and abstract quasi-techno rhythms that have been warped and slowed down into a monstrous doom-laden crawl, then suddenly shifting into a noise-drenched industrial doomdirge, reverberating with bass-heavy detonations and slow, violently off-kilter dubbed-out drums that churn and thud beneath guttural droning guitars. There are moments when the music lurches into an almost pneumatic sort of rhythmic power, an ultra-heavy industrialized throb that feels like some bizarre Wax Trax remix job, and elsewhere you can hear the Haxan Cloak's vintage horror-soundtrack influences seeping into the glitch-riddled, slow-motion crush. On the final song "Darkness Surrounds Us", droning dissonant violin-like sounds introduce the track, joined by eerie female voices and distant swarms of murky noise as it slowly builds to a punishing monotonous doom dirge, that destructive downtuned doom-crush bulldozing its way through a storm of screeching metallic noise and heavily processed feedback, closing the album with a final blast of fearsome electronic chaos.