Body Void Deliver Pulverizing Sludge/ Doom Metal On Captivating Latest Record

The New England-based sludge/ doom duo Body Void unveil incinerating anguish across their profoundly impactful new full-length album, Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth. With abrasive, flamethrower-like guitars, seismically resounding drums, and even a thread of scouring noise (among other elements), Body Void depict a tormented, personalized look at disarray.

Generally speaking, this latest Body Void effort is dynamically sprawling, but the trodding rhythms occupy a relatively central spot. Even while sticking to an often agonizingly drawn out pace — and even as feedback clouds the path — the record moves forward, cultivating a sense of desperate urgency, as though it captures simmering frenzy that has been tempered only by the overwhelming breadth of the turmoil.

It’s just massive — the formidable, teeming mix feels like an overpowering, thorny thicket. Sinking into the hellishly fiery sludge of this new release seems like suddenly realizing the true scope of some particular instance of destruction and collapsing, wracked with all-consuming woe.

Combining monumentally expansive atmosphere with piercing rhythmic ache, the grueling, sometimes crusty riffs land like inward tidal waves of grief from which there is no apparent escape. It’s like a record-length experience of abruptly screaming in horror when looking out across some wrecked expanse affected by natural — or man-made — disaster. The destabilizing anxiety of observing destruction (of any sort) that seems without end, the knowledge of individual instances of what the disaster has taken away, and the exhausted strain of handling — or trying to handle — an utterly upending instance of devastation — all of these feelings, among others, disorientingly mesh throughout this imposing new record.

The simmering instrumentation proves atmospheric, with hefty resonance, and the pulverizing unrest expands that into a sense of facing off with far-reaching destruction.

Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth packs some searing menace that seems particularly tangible — among other moments — on “Laying Down In A Forest Fire,” which (lyrically speaking) condemns those who have resorted to “complicity” as catastrophe unfolds. After several minutes, the track’s groove — which sounds heavy enough to carve out a muck-filled trench in the earth — shifts a bit, evolving into a jarringly repeating heave. As it approaches its end, the song features sudden moments of fierce coarsened punk, as though grimy rapids have suddenly burst over the side of a cliff. The riffing suggests blistering rage, which sounds inextricably intertwined with the song’s sinews.

Crust punk vibes — adeptly woven into the album’s broader tapestry — reappear elsewhere, including for a short stint after several minutes of album opener “Wound” and towards the end of album closer “Pale Man.” After about eight minutes, “Wound” rolls into entrancing percussion blasts that are just mesmerizing. The shock waves from every hit are dragged out to excruciating lengths. Sonically speaking, this latest Body Void effort is absolutely impressive, providing an enthralling, volatile, and musically fresh trek into fiery storms.

The abrasion throughout the entire work makes the destruction that it’s reacting to seem ongoing. Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth sounds less like an after-the-fact meditation and more — even in its pointedly expansive, doom-inclined moments — like a shifting mixture of convulsive agony with an immediately developing awareness of what is taking place. The flamethrowers that the album sonically suggests have been turned against vestiges of life — they’re so close that the heat is blinding.

Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth by Body Void is available via Prosthetic Records (on vinyl) and Tridroid Records (on cassette).

5/5 Stars