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.
The You, Whom I Have Always Hated LP flows perfectly from the previous collaboration. 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.