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 monoriffage 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. It's a pretty

badass closeout. Comes in a hand-assembled digipack. Apparently these are sold out from the label - we've got a handful but I'm not sure if we'll be able to

restock these once they're gone.