Band:	Body Void
Album:	I Live Inside A Burning House
Style:	Sludge metal
Release date:	May 11, 2018
Guest review by:	LuciferOfGayness

01. Intro / A Burning House
02. Haunted
03. Trauma Creature
04. Phantom Limb
05. Given

For decades, men have spent their time in cellars and studios clanging their penises together to create the sound of sludge. As a whole, sludge is a genre that's created by men for men; they are the ones who make the rules of sludge and what good sludge sounds like. Body Void is a three-piece sludge/doom band where one of the members is a non-binary person and queer.

The debut, Ruins, which focused mainly on the topic of fatalism, was a good album. Body Void's second full-length, I Live Inside A Burning House, is an album about the human body and being inside of a non-binary body, which explains the poetic title. ILIABH is a heavy sludge album with a blend of doom that at times is so slow that it has a drony sound. The album also has some faster crusty parts and tempo shifts, but despite the tempo shifts, the album requires a patient listener. Overall this is a much bigger, more mammoth, longer, and better release than their debut.

Like their contemporaries Primitive Man, Body Void sounds anxious and depressive, but as the band names suggests, they have different perspectives. ILIABH is lyric-wise a depressive record about gender dysphoria. The character in the songs wants to get out of its body. The lyrics are poetical and delusional, balancing the edge of insanity; the androgynous vocals are screeching in anxiety. But despite the pain, the drony sludge and doom on this album are a beautiful affair. It is an album where the body is relevant for making music.

Doom is a genre full of pain, but even for seasoned doom lovers this could be a painful album as the topic is a bit more relevant than the usual first-world problems. I Live Inside A Burning House is a enjoyable album that is connected to abuse and discrimination. If there weren't any discrimination of non-binary persons in society there wouldn't be such beautiful pain on this album to enjoy. This isn't an album that tries to change the genre by not having a penis, but it comes with a slightly new perspective that's a phantom limb. It's a phantom limb lost in its own bodily darkness, which has started to burn like a house in an excellent way.