Have you ever crashed your car? I have, several times as a teenager.When I try to remember the moment of impact from any of those incidents — when I sideswiped a truck, or when I hit the brakes but still rear-ended a sedan on the highway — all I can recall is the blankness of my mind at the point of collision.
I am reminded of this when I hear “Less Meaning” by the Body, a syncopated song that embodies the way disaster can induce the feeling of going in-and-out of consciousness.“Less Meaning” is only one blip of madness on The Crying Out Of Things, the new album by the experimental duo consisting of guitarist/vocalist Chip King and electronics/percussionist Lee Buford.
It feels like no coincidence that the record arrives the week we turn our clocks back so darkness falls earlier; autumn is the perfect time to unveil heavy music, as proved by noise-rock crew Chat Pile last month with the bleak masterpiece Cool World, on which sinister textures ooze and grow like mold.On the other hand, The Crying Out Of Things communicates malice with strictly explosive, in-your-face pandemonium with little breathing room.
The Crying Out Of Things is made up of nine tracks, but it’s impossible when listening to tell when one song ends and another begins.The music flows at its own accord.
The murky opener “Last Things” unfolds anxiously with drumrolls, tambourine, and a voice distorted into villainous anonymity, leaving the words completely obfuscated, before erupting into a heavy crescendo with deafening guitars and King’s shouts, which are thoroughly guttural to the point of being inhuman; they ring through the songs like the sirens of ambulances.On the enormous “Careless And Worn,” horns by Dan Blacksburg cut through the blaring clamor with elegant eeriness, portraying a kind of ancient anguish and giving the music the sense of a funeral march.
Chat Pile’s brand of seething aggression resonates, capturing the way pain and grief can be invisi...