Band:	The Body
Album:	I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer
Style:	Avantgarde metal, Industrial metal
Release date:	May 11, 2018
A review by:	RaduP

01. The Last Form Of Loving
02. Can Carry No Weight
03. Partly Alive
04. The West Has Failed
05. Nothing Stirs
06. Off Script
07. An Urn
08. Blessed, Alone
09. Sickly Heart Of Sand
10. Ten Times A Day, Every Day, A Stranger

For a band whose number of collaborations rivals their actual output, The Body still manage to captivate with their own material. Following up their self-described "gross pop" album, now there's a few more twists and tweaks to their experimentation with electronic sounds.

The Body has already built up their reputation both as crafters of some bleak and anxiety-inducing music and as redefiners of said sound. They've collaborated with the likes of Thou, Full Of Hell and Krieg, but you probably already know that. Their most interesting twist was twisting their usual sludge sound on Nobody Deserves Happiness, taking electronic sampling that made something that could pass as a hip-hop beat and convulsing it into something distorted and terrifying. Now we have an album whose title is inspired by a line from a famous suicide note, that of Virginia Woolf, that features contributions from Chrissy Wolpert of Assembly Of Light Choir, Ben Eberle of Sandworm, Kristin Hayter of Lingua Ignota, and almost 3rd member Chrissy Wolpert among others, and that has the promise of something that will bring the listeners to their lowest low.

While working with just about the same building blocks, I Have Fought Against It manages to sound a lot more cinematic, whether in the epic meaning of the word (like in "Partly Alive") or just generally like it could pass as a hypnotic soundtrack to a movie (ambiance-wise, not compositionally). There is very little actually metal on this record, being much closer to noise or death industrial or whatever Death Grips is. The samples are a bit different this time, as they're not just drums and guitars with post-production, which makes the entire sound of the record much more focused on the ambient electronic side. The background still usually features a layer of noise or droning guitar and either the trademark screams of Chip King or one of the guests (the inclusion of which does give the vocal side of this record a bit of range). There are a lot of surprises, like a drum sample continuously getting stretched until it's mangled and unnatural and a sudden halt followed by a piano and strings and Chrissy Wolpert break, a throwback to the album's opening act, which obviously does get corrupted by distortion almost immediately. And then there's the final track, which features a reading of Czech author Bohumil Hrabal's novel Too Loud A Solitude. I'm not going to spoil it, but hopefully you don't really relate to it, but you can't help to empathize. Just like Woolf, Hrabal commited suicide.

The Body not only don't linger too long in the same place, but also managed to create their most emotional record, the peak of emptiness. Get bodied.