The Body- No One Deserves Happiness (2016)

The Body- No One Deserves Happiness (2016)

By: Ghost Writer

I wrote somewhere else how much I loved Kanye West album 808 & Heartbreak, it was an awesome record that elevated the capability of 808 to really admirable artist heights, in West's hands and fingers, 808 machines became almighty instruments with heart and soul.

This time I'm not writing but about a very different type of beast, while Kanye can outrageously claim to be David Bowie's evolutionary musical heir, this musical creature is nearly non paralleled in previous musical history, The Body, a Rhode Island band has created recently a musical niche all of their own, equally inhabiting the world of extreme metal, noise rock, doom and electronica, there must be something weird going on in Rhode Island that produces beast like The Body and noise legends Lightning Bolt.

This time The Body has directed their experimental hunger towards the uncommon (for them) worlds of pop and electronica, taking cue from West love letter album to 808,into creating what could be known as the ugliest and most extreme metal in pop music.

No One Deserves Happiness might be the most beautiful and at the same the ugliest thing you will hear these days, a brutal musical ying yang of sorts, but don't be fooled by the angelical voices of Wanderings as they are just the beginning of this infernal descent.

Shelter is Illusory is an epic theme with mastodon like drumming and wild screaming, the band generates here big doses of static with a sound so relevant that lives both in the worlds of doom metal and crazy electronica, free from restricted structures and taking full advantage of the heavenly girl choruses that accompanies the duo on this daring recording, giving themselves a chance to get even more immerse on white noise in For You.

Noise and sludge are invoked in Hallow/Hollow, a massive conjunction of free form sound falling from the sky with guitarist vocalist Chip King destroy his vocal chords and letting his fingers bleed when hitting the strings, all this while Lee Buford hits his drums so painfully slow that it hurts a lot, this is really ugly music, but again the heavenly chorus appear just at the end, reminding me of certain sonic dynamics developed years ago by the great Ben Frost.

808 receive us in Two Snakes, with Buford interchanging brutal attacks with the machine while King give us generous doses of atmospheric guitars, creating an almost industrial version of hell and heaven clashing furiously in a way that could make Godflesh's Justin K. Broadrick jealous, even daring to get into dark and Gothic territories with Adamah, again evoking Broadrick's metallic sheets of guitar and lurking reptilian percussion.

No One Deserves Happiness is a unique recording, a little monotonous in some moments, but also full of surprises, with the band in fully experimental mode, letting themselves add new dimensions to their already hard to describe sound, surprises like on the eerie Prescience, or the pure noise Gothic electric blast of The Myth Arc, throughout the whole record the duo successfully expand their already ambitious approach, creating here one of the best extreme metal recordings of the year, one that is both enjoyable and painful to listen to, but a big rewarding experience all the way, Kanye West might be financially broken, but The Body shows, along with the 808 machine, that they are not short of ideas.