Providence, Rhode Island’s The Body are a study in contrasts. The band began as a guitar/drums duo but has augmented their newest release All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood with an additional thirty musicians. Known mostly for churning, down-tuned dirge, the band now incorporates quieter and more intricate passages which add nuance to their onslaught. The contrast is not specific to their newest release either – based on their choice of covers alone, the band has drawn from influences as disparate as Sinead O’Connor and Body Count.
But with the arrival of their newest album, the Body has demonstrated that they are one of the most interesting bands currently operating in the slower end of the heavy music spectrum. While many such bands are content to plod away with uninspired sludge and to measure their worth more by their collections of vintage Sunn amps than by their ability to write memorable music, The Body has demonstrated their ability to craft a sound that is no less vicious for its boundary-pushing. Though there are still a few months left until the final decision can be made, All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood may well be the best album released all year.
I had a chance to get a few questions in with drummer Lee Buford about where the band has been and where they’re going.
Providence, Rhode Island’s The Body are a study in contrasts. The band began as a guitar/drums duo but has augmented their newest release All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood with an additional thirty musicians. Known mostly for churning, down-tuned dirge, the band now incorporates quieter and more intricate passages which add nuance to their onslaught. The contrast is not specific to their newest release either – based on their choice of covers alone, the band has drawn from influences as disparate as Sinead O’Connor and Body Count.
But with the arrival of their newest album, the Body has demonstrated that they are one of the most interesting bands currently operating in the slower end of the heavy music spectrum. While many such bands are content to plod away with uninspired sludge and to measure their worth more by their collections of vintage Sunn amps than by their ability to write memorable music, The Body has demonstrated their ability to craft a sound that is no less vicious for its boundary-pushing. Though there are still a few months left until the final decision can be made, All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood may well be the best album released all year.
I had a chance to get a few questions in with drummer Lee Buford about where the band has been and where they’re going.
RVA: Your newest album features a vast expansion on your instrumentation. What motivated the change?
Lee Buford: It’s hard to capture the feeling of the live show on recordings since so much of it has to do with the volume and the physical aspect of it being so bass heavy. So we tried to make the recording as dense as the live show, but instead of volume, using a wide variety of instruments and musicians.
RVA: How much of the extended instrumentation will carry over into your live show?
Buford: When we’re in Providence or around there, we try to incorporate extra drummers when we can, but besides that it’s usually just us two on tour. We’ve talked about doing a short tour with the choir but we’re still trying to figure out how to make it work.
RVA: Is this a musical direction you’re going to further explore, or is future material going to see a return to the more straightforward lo-fi heavy approach?
Buford: We usually have two recording styles, one where we record at home–and that has a very lo-fi aesthetic–and the other at Machines With Magnets, where we try to utilize the studio as much as possible. We enjoy both of them in different ways, so I’m sure you’ll see recordings in both styles in the future. We are going back to Machines With Magnets in November to record a new 7″ with the choir, so that will be more like the new record.
RVA: Your choice of covers on previous releases has demonstrated a fairly disparate set of influences. What were you drawing from when it came time to orchestrate the new record? There seems to be a wide variety of source material at play.
Buford: Musically, I think we try not to limit ourselves as far as what we listen to and what we allow to influence us. On this recording we wanted to kind of recreate the sounds of Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, and ELO in the way that you can listen to those records a hundred times and still notice new things that are layered in there.
Buford: Thematically, we are influenced by anything that tries to distance itself from mankind since we believe mankind is inherently flawed and nothing good can come of it.
RVA: The album’s art pairs eerie, yet aesthetically appealing, photographs of hooded soldiers and their weapons with the sense of menace implicit to the subject matter, in much the same way that the music pairs quieter choral moments with crashing heaviness. Was that intentional, and do you feel that’s at all reflected in the lyrics which seem pretty uniformly grim?
Buford: We wanted to make something vague. The photography and the choir pieces are extremely beautiful and well thought out, but they represent and go along with an ugliness that makes a (hopefully) interesting end result.
RVA: It seems that a lot of the lyrics deal with striking back at a decaying, corrupt society in whatever means possible. Do you feel like that’s a common thread among your influences, both musical (Body Count, MDC) and non-musical (Jim Jones, Charles Manson)?
Buford: Yes, there is a commonality between our musical and non-musical influences, in that they all represent a struggle. I think when we first started, we were more along the lines of people versus political factions, and [the songs] had kind of a hope to them, but over time I think we’ve become more nihilistic, in that we have lost most of the hope we had.
RVA: Your music relies on a more experimental musical approach and a more confrontational lyrical stance than many sludgier bands, but The Body often gets lumped into the doom/stoner metal category. Do you relate to a lot of that scene at all?
Buford: I feel like we don’t really relate to a lot of it. There are some bands in that genre that we love, but as a whole I feel what we’re trying to express is more along the lines of black metal, which is mostly about hate and frustration.
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The Body plays Strange Matter on Monday, September 13th with Cough and Bad Dream. A review of All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood can be found here.
