Band:	The Body / Whitehorse
Album:	Whitehorse & The Body [Collaboration]
Style:	Avantgarde metal, Industrial metal
Release date:	January 11, 2019
A review by:	Auntie Sahar

01. In My Heart The Answer Is Yes, But I Said No.
02. We Found You Totally Innocent, Which Is The Worst Crime Of All.

The Body are quite prolific, having amassed a dense number of full lengths, EPs, splits, and collaborations over their 20 year career. This inevitably raises the question of "can a band that pumps out so many releases maintain quality between them all?" For The Body's latest collab with Whitehorse, then, we're about to find out.

As you could probably guess by the title, Whitehorse & The Body is? yeah, a collaborative EP between the extreme sludgers of Australia's Whitehorse and the industrial Avant-garde noise metal terrorists we all know and love from The Body. Though brief, going just over the 16 minute mark, if one is familiar with both bands it's pretty easy to tell that "the Whitehorse sound" is the one that exerted more of an influence in the final product here, resulting in a sound that is a lot more structured, doomy, and all around rhythmic than most of what The Body have been up to lately. If you haven't particularly been a fan of Chip and Lee going in a more formless, industrialized noise direction with their sound recently, this could come as a welcome shift.

With that said, this certainly does not mean that The Body's sound has been swallowed up entirely with this collab, even if it does have a less than 50% presence in the final formula. The first track here is very groovy, riff heavy, and more in Whitehorse territory than anything, but it does nonetheless contain some of the trademark, swirly electronic sounds that have become The Body's trademark. The second track, however is considerably different, and while it still leans more toward Whitehorse's approach, an influence from The Body is a lot more noticeable: things get a little more melodic and atmospheric, Chip's infamous screeches come into play more, and toward the middle there's quite a bit of that plodding, industrialized drumming delivery that is unquestionably The Body's signature.

While not quite as good as their collabs with Full Of Hell or the one they did with The Haxan Cloak, The Body's collab with Whitehorse is still a pretty damn good effort, and as strong a testament as any to the great ability the duo have to morph and redefine their sound in many different ways. Although I may have liked more of a 50/50 synthesis between the sounds of both bands here, the fact that this collab is more inclined to Whitehorse actually makes things a little more interesting, as it represents a new shift for The Body's collab approach in which they sort of just sprinkle their influence on top rather than injecting it straight into the core. 20 years into their career and with a ton of releases under their belt, The Body can at times be a real "hit or miss" type band, but this time around, with Whitehorse's help, they've definitely racked up a hit.

The impending pain welcomes you. Go suffer humbly.