Happy Tuesday! As we muddle our way through this final week of 2021, I’ll continue to try getting as much stuff written as possible to wrap up the year, culminating with the revealing of my highly-anticipated Top 21 of 2021 list.

While the exact details of that list are currently secreted away in a locked vault in an undisclosed location, but one thing I can absolutely guarantee is that it will include THIS record, which answers the question, “What if Body Void but slower, and perhaps — just maybe — a bit more emotionally devastating?”

Hellish Form – Remains (Translation Lost Records, 25 June 2021)

If you can remember this far back — it feels like an entire lifetime ago — in very early 2020 there was a split record between west coasters Keeper and New England’s Body Void, one filled with fantastically vicious, atrocious noise, and that at a time when we truly had no concept of how terrible things could actually be.

Well, since that time, Willow Ryan who handles guitar, bass, and vocals for Body Void has teamed up with Jacob Lee who’s responsible for similar duties in Keeper to write and record a collaborative LP as Hellish Form (remotely, from their separate locations in opposite corners of these here United States).

The resultant Remains includes four tracks (averaging around eleven minutes apiece), every bit as harrowing as the output of its creators’ other bands — loads of feedback and distortion, and hideously pained vocals — but reinvented as agonizingly slow funeral sludge/doom. Much of the time, the droning overdriven guitar chords are paired with strings or some other sort of synthy sounds (and on a few occasions, a gently tinkling piano) in the background, the combination of which often comes across as somewhat euphonic or harmonic, producing a peaceful and cathartic effect.

Hopeful-sounding funeral doom, could that be a thing? I guess it makes as much sense as anything else that’s happening in the world these days…

Remains is available from the duo’s Bandcamp page as a NYP download; on vinyl, cassette, or CD. (The vinyl can also be found via Amazon Prime or directly from Translation Loss, whatever works best for you based on shipping to your location.)
 

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http://hellishform.bandcamp.com
http://twitter.com/hellishform
 
http://translationloss.com
http://translationlossrecords.bandcamp.com
http://twitter.com/TranslationLoss