Body Void – Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth, 23 April 2021
(Prosthetic Records LP+CD / Tridroid Records cassette)

Following up on yesterday’s post, today I will again feature a band whose first few releases have been incredible (more on that here and here) and have consistently landed upon my list of top releases for whatever year they happened to have been released; and who is now putting out another masterpiece of a record this year.

This one is due to reach the general public in exactly two days. Brace yourselves, and let’s talk about Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth.

This new album features a quartet of tracks, each nearly approaching a quarter of an hour in length, so — well, you’re an adult, you know how math works.

And while Body Void has always been known for producing bleak ugly blackened noise, every single minute of these four songs represents some of the gut-wrenchingest, heartrendingest, downright nastiest sound collages to hit this listener’s ears in quite some time.

To start with, those guitar tones are completely abysmal: far more distorted noise than anything resembling melodic notes in each section of absurdly sludgy doom riffs. And the passion with which those lyrics are screeched! But I mean, it absolutely makes sense in context — the album was composed and recorded in summer 2020, which as some of you may recall, was a pretty fucked up time to be living in America. (Although to be honest, if anything, things have only gotten worse since then.)

Two of the songs, half the overall running time, have been released as advance singles — more than enough to give a taste of the feelings of bitterness and desolation here. However, if I was going to pick a favorite it would be the second track “Laying Down in a Forest Fire”; specifically from 3:30 to about 7:00. After the first few minutes of noisy riffs, everything drops out but the bass, gritty and grumbly — then a touch of feedback from one guitar part, and the drums come thundering in along with the bass — then a second kind of atmospheric-post-black tremoloey sounding guitar part gets added, and eventually another one, all just perfectly spaced out across the stereo field.

But frankly, the album is best absorbed in its entirety. In fact, you may not find yourself with any other choice. I first heard it about two weeks ago during a hockey game, when I’d turned this on as something to drown out TV announcers who I find annoying. And immediately found myself so engrossed in the music that I had lost any concept of whatever was happening outside of my headphones. By the following morning, I had recovered enough to send an email to the PR contact person for Prosthetic with one simple message: “Holy shit!”

Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth is currently available to pre-order in all formats:
LP/CD (and an assortment of t-shirts) here; cassette here.
 

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