Back in stock. The ongoing collaboration between Baton Rouge doom metallers Thou and avant-sludge duo The Body continues apace with You, Whom I Have Always Hated, which picks up from their previous collab with more crushing noise-damaged heaviness, creeping doom-laden atmosphere and chunks of twisted mega-crush. The LP release of You, Whom... is certainly heavy enough on its own, but the expanded CD release also includes the entire Released From Love album that came out last year, for maximum art-sludge punishment.

    On the CD, that Released From Love material is first, delivering 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 weight 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 succeed in coalescing into a massive grinding force, an avalanche of asphalt-encrusted down-tuned riffage and gut-churning bass, tribal drums slowly pounding out their hypnotic rhythms. It's not until the two-pronged vocal attack comes in that you can hear the respective front men doing their thing, Chip King's strained, breathless howl drifting over Bryan Funck's monstrous growl, both of these tortured voices echoing through the thin layer of black ether that hangs suspended above the pulverizing dirge. 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.

    It's "In Meetings Hearts Beat Closer" over on side two that really flattened me, though. 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 on this one 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 its 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.

    The other half of the disc features the newer You, Whom I Have Always Hated LP, and flows perfectly from the previous material. Again, you get this heavy industrial-tinged vibe as soon as the opener "Her Strongholds Unvanquishable" kicks in, with its pummeling metal-shop rhythms echoing beneath squalls of feedback and rumbling noise, leading straight into the song's immense, noise-drenched power-dirge. That sets the tone for the rest of the record, the two bands again fusing together into a monstrous, noisy roar of droning doom metal, the vocals shifting back and forth between guttural roars and that extreme high-pitched screamo-esque yelp, the slow rhythmic pound of hammers slamming against sheet metal ringing out while ultra-distorted, massively down-tuned riffs uncoil in slow motion. The group occasionally lurch into a kind of sickening, deformed groove on tracks like "The Devils Of Trust", while the unexpected cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie" really delivers on that quasi-industrial metal hinted at before, heaving mechanical rhythms and eerie droning guitars surrounded by bursts of processed feedback and distortion, resulting in one of the most interesting tracks to emerge from this experiment (not to mention one of the catchiest). Those industrial elements surface over the rest of the record, with lots of noisy loops and grating textures woven into the tectonic crush, but there's also a brief track titled "He Returns..." that offers its own gorgeously grim soundscape of distant machinelike thunder and ominous ambience towards the end, while the last song sees members of Assembly Of Light Choir joining the fray, lending their haunting vocal harmonies to a hideously lumbering dirge that plows vast black furrows into the earth. Great stuff that leaves me wanting to hear even more from this great team-up.