#chip king

On 2016’s No One Deserves Happiness, the ratio of electronics to guitars shifted decidedly in the direction of the knobs and toggles and effect boxes. Given the album’s thoroughgoing interest in (and loathsomely effective critique of) the vapid textures of contemporary pop music, all the digitally derived sound made sense. But that shift seems to have represented more than one album’s worth of conceptual interest. With I Have Fought Against It, but I Can’t Any Longer, the Body have generated a record of power electronics, descending at times into harsh noise, punctuated at points by mournful passages of ambient beauty.  

So back to that good trick: It’s a hard record to listen to, but once you do, it’s hard to listen to anything else. Check out “Nothing Stirs”, smack in the middle of the record, and one of its longest songs: it starts with digital beats, shuddering and hollow. It’s the attenuated sound of mechanized culture. A synth and what sounds like a cello drone, emptying an ominous space around the beat. Ninety seconds in, cacophonous cymbal crashes and King’s batshit falsetto drench and tear at the beat. Kristen Hayter, who records under the moniker Lingua Ignota, adds her magisterial voice, which rises along a cresting synth line. Then Hayter demonstrates the other gnarly stuff her voice can do: repeating “March on, march on…” she begins to growl and chew on the syllables, gurgling and bellowing. Eventually the instrumental tracks drop out, leaving only the harrowed sound of wind through a tunnel. It’s grim, and beautiful, but mostly grim.  

Much of the record follows that prescription: aesthetically profound, emotionally disconsolate. A song title sums things up well: “The West Has Failed”. Listening to the Body, scrolling through news, watching the Republic collapse — it’s hard to argue, and I Have Fought Against It, but I Can’t Any Longer provides a fittingly despondent soundtrack. The concluding song, “Ten Times a Day, Every Day, a Stranger”, slides into near-total despair, comprising two minutes of distorted glissando, then six minutes of doleful piano and a recitation of what sound like journal entries by a paranoid, alienated, isolated man: “My whole room hurts, my whole bedroom. The view from the window hurts. Kids go to school, people go shopping, everybody knows where to go. Only I do not know where I want to go….” And so on. The surprise is that the words are provided by Bohumil Hrabal, from his Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka. Hrabal was a Czech intellectual, dissident and writer who survived the Nazi occupation and then decades of Soviet political oppression. Few minds have borne greater witness to modernity’s varied monstrosities, and then written about suffering with greater sensitivity. It’s a remarkable reference for a metal band to drop, but entirely in keeping with the rigor of the Body’s cultural project: a testament to art’s capacity to live with pain.