Hey, you. Yeah, you there. I know why you’re here. We both know what you came for. Most people spend their lives seeking out virtue and beauty, but not you. No, you’re not here for that bullshit: you want something that will make you vomit, something that will cause you pain. Something that’s going to make every neuron in your brain cry out in the most basic, animalistic way, saying simply, stop. You want to hear the hiss and crackle of vinyl being played on a hot plate, the sound of sound itself collapsing and dripping into puddles of molten plastic; you crave the ear-shredding noise of two industrial cities crashing together like doomed ships, an avalanche of rubble and steel, a pair of concrete goliaths grinding against each other the way your molars gnash together when you chew a tough, overcooked piece of meat.
I got something for you. Yeah, you see this? You know what this is? This is One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache, the half-hour collaboration from The Body and Full Of Hell, two bands coming together to mash all of the pain and torment inherent in the human body – joints creaking against cartilage and muscles firing in random spasms, nerves pinching and sinew stretching – into a sonic experience you can repeat time and time again.
Right from the explosion of noise 40 seconds into the opening eponymous track, this is clearly not an album for everyone. The two groups present on this release don’t care about anything beyond being as jarring and grim as possible, and by god, it works marvelously: the vocalists of each band coming together – the yells and screams from Full Of Hell and the tormented shrieks of The Body – are the hallmark of this record, a duet equally tortured and torturing as they both vocalize their pain into the wall of noise created by the backing band. That isn’t to say it’s pedal to the masochistic metal the entire time, though, as the second track, “Fleshworks”, shows off the other side of this combination. Ethereal and beautiful, it’s three minutes of pulsing, wavering female vocals and light drumming, and then back into the world of the ugly, with a droning cover of “The Butcher” by Leonard Cohen that hisses and oozes, reminiscent of the slow burn of magma down a mountainside, or maggots uniformly and leisurely chewing at the necrotic tissue of a gaping side wound. Static seeps out of the speakers and fuzz holds the mind captive throughout the whole release; no matter the pace at which The Body and Full Of Hell travel through their destructive sonic dystopias, this is a record that pins the listener down and makes them to endure the noisy, chaotic violence with their eyes forced open for the whole duration.
At times, this feels like a crash course through bands that have made a career from misanthropy and solitude. One Day channels the visceral, industrial grimness of earlier Swans, the thick, meaty textures of Sunn O))), and the raw, unadulterated intensity of Napalm Death. Both bands work together to bring the best of abrasive and eclectic heavy music into an acidic mixture that is both captivating and terrifying. That isn’t to say that this record isn’t its own beast, though, as the identities of each group are written into this album’s DNA. This is a Full Of Hell record, and this is a The Body record, just as much as it is a Full Of Hell & The Body record.
One part noisy electronics, one part thick, droning sludge, one part blast-beat-centric hardcore, and a whole hell of a lot of negative emotions, One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache is the result of two extremely competent bands doing what they do best, together. This is not a pretty record; this is not a subtle record. This album is everything disgusting and vile on this planet mashed into a half-hour of sound. Anybody looking for something that could ostensibly be considered “music” in the traditional sense is going to walk away disappointed. Those of us, however, who relish in the sort of self-inflicted sonic pain that both of these groups employ are going to walk away from this collaboration with what very well could end up being one of the best albums of 2016.
Full Of Hell & The Body – One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache gets…
