Review: Intensive Care + The Body ‘Was I Good Enough?’
It’s been roughly a decade since I last wrote about a release from experimental Portland metal duo The Body. Back then, they teamed with Louisiana hardcore miscreants Thou for the savage You, Whom I Have Always Hated. In the interim years, the pairing of guitarist/vocalist Chip King and drummer/programmer Lee Buford have kept busy, churning out four studio albums and twelve further collaborations with a myriad of artists such as Full Of Hell, Dis Fig and Uniform to name a few.
Their latest release sees them paired with Canadian industrial act Intensive Care. Comprising of Andrew Nolan and Ryan Bloomer, they have been making squalling, intense noise, rooted in hardcore and metal, refracted through a nightmare industrial filter that has seen them amass an impressive catalogue of dense and twisted electronica.
Having toured together in 2018, based on mutual respect and friendship, the two bands had the genesis of a sonic union that would remain on the shelf until 2021. The writing process involved The Body creating the basis of an album and sharing it with Intensive Care. Over the following eighteen months, Nolan and Bloomer deconstructed and reconstructed this foundation using hip hop techniques, samples, loops and changing tempos to create a ‘corrosive and caustic collage’. The two bands would work on this to truly craft something beyond the original blueprints, reflecting the voice of both artists and ‘try to transcend the boundaries of the genre and redefine what heavy means to us.’
The resulting Was I Good Enough? is an eight-track howl into the void that combines feral and raw blasts of sounds, shrill and uncomfortable collisions of noise that crawl into your brain, whilst retaining the distinct styles of each band. One of the notable things of this release is the continuity that runs through the thirty-eight-minute duration in the form of a shrieking, electronic, screaming sample that creates a bizarre, unsettling overarching voice.
This dark journey kicks off with the scything alarm sounds of Mistakes Have Been Made, rattling your consciousness as overdriven, fuzzy industrial hammering stamps, grinds and grates. The buzzing guitars have a huge, fat (or maybe phat?) tone that belies the hip-hop production style as they lurch over the slow, ominous beats while the gruff, guttural vocals bellow over the shifting and sliding loops. The jarring, screaming breaks are discordant and wrench you out of the abrasive rhythmic atmosphere, before they plunge you into subsonic dropouts with vertigo inducing free fall.
Ringing, vibrating percussion heralds the brutally succinct Swallowed By The God. Backed by clattering sounds like coat hangers thrashed against metal trash cans, once more the screaming samples burrow into your brain, intruding into your thoughts and refusing to allow the track to be rendered background music such is the intensity. The chopped-up formatting brings dub-style slips and jumps that collide with the flow of the track in a truly discombobulating feel.
The Misunderstanding crushes with digital doom-like reverberations. The mechanical beats and howling samples churn as they ebb and flow in and out of the foreground. The modulated vocals are mournful and angry as they grind over the erratically paced beats, samples and distorted synth that bounce with a rubbery texture.
Buzzing like an angry insect, At Death’s Door features a drill-like sample over a pulsing beat that crashes and morphs into a lurching groove. Drenched in creeping atmospherics, the slow, faltering vocals rage over gruelling passages of audio horror. The Godflesh like growls punctuate the heavier, droning sections, interspersed with what should be ambient moments, but sound more like the creaking of a haunted house.
The jarring, screaming breaks are discordant and wrench you out of the abrasive rhythmic atmosphere…
The harsh pulsing continues on The Riderless Mount, the distorted crackle of the guitar burbles like looping feedback under the taught, pounding tattoo of the drums. Subtle textures rise and vanish as quickly as they come over the crawling pace that recalls some of Ministry’s Filth Pig and Darkside Of The Spoon era material with the slow breakbeats and stop/start flows.
Cartography Of Suffering doubles down on the grinding drone and piercing yowls; the drawn-out introduction with jarring intrusions like a needle to the ear lumbers into motion like an unstoppable juggernaut. The industrial, piston like metronome of the beat is relentless and oppressive, as if you are trapped in a dream being chased down by marching machinery. The vocals wheeze with distortion before clear, feral rasps break through, making lines like ‘every day is a new day’ sound utterly terrifying.
With percussive thumps and scraping sounds of Unwanted slither like the unwinding of a malevolent serpent’s coils. The disturbing sample echoes and repeats, jarring and insistently as walls of dub collied with delirious light electronic sounds in a seeming freewill of madness before the final track Mandelbrot Anamnesis starts with ominous low samples and a heartbeat like beat.
With backwards shifting feedback and crushing phases, the long running track bristles with tension and after a woozy organ break, the music returns with full force as a violent cacophony. The vocals snarl and spit with ill concealed venom and the slipping feel of the rhythm presses all of its considerable weight down on you. The barrage grows and grows, becoming all consuming and bordering on pure noise until it breaks into a final, fading death rattle.
It feels redundant to say that The Body are constantly creating unique and challenging music, as that has literally been their MO since day one. Was I Good Enough? Is the latest in a long line of releases that has seen them take their soul crushing mindset and create some of the heaviest, dread-laced sounds imaginable. With their hip-hop slash and burn style of production, Intensive Care only add to that. This cerebral approach from artists who complement King and Buford’s dystopian outlook has truly crafted something other, something fitting for these dysfunctional times we exist in.
Label: Closed Casket Activities
Intensive Care: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
The Body: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Mark Hunt-Bryden
