Orchards Of A Futile Heaven by The Body and Dis Fig
Release date: February 23, 2024Label: Thrill Jockey
The Body and Dis Fig are two musical mavericks who have always done things resolutely on their own terms so to have them team up on as they have on their debut collaborative effort Orchards Of A Futile Heaven is a match made both in heaven and in hell.
That feeling of heaven and hell is tantamount to the extreme places that Orchards Of A Futile Heaven will take you as it consumes you over its seven tracks.
While both The Body and Dis Fig have plenty of experience with previous collaborations, The Body having made immense music with Thou, Full Of Hell, BIG|BRAVE and Uniform to name a few and Dis Fig has worked extensively with The Bug (someone who The Body have collaborated live with as well), this meeting of minds and visions, works in the most perfect way, as if The Body and Dis Fig were made to work together.
With the hypnotic vocals of Dis Fig working in some warped kind of harmony with the disharmonic and brilliantly nightmarish soundscapes that The Body’s Lee Buford and Chip King create (this is best exemplified by the album’s title track, but every track in this album fulfils that with ease), the songs on Orchards Of A Futile Heaven are a dream to listen to.
Those vocals by Dis Fig are performed sublimely throughout and truly demonstrate how much of an impressive vocalist she is, from her hazy and dreamlike singing over The Body’s dubbed up harsh noise on ‘To Walk A Higher Path’ to the spoken word mantra on ‘Holy Lance’ which simply explodes into an immense wall of sound as the music crashes into life to the cathartic primal screams she emits on the truly epic noise of ‘Coils Of Kara’, it is constantly one hell of performance that will leave you in awe.
Those hellish soundscapes by The Body are a thing of beauty as well and allow Dis Fig to truly let loose as the band do as well and the whole album flows so well in that you don’t even get a chance to catch your breath until it’s all over when the last wail of closing track ‘Back To The Water’ (a song that sounds like a lament for the end of the world) fades out and it sounds sonically phenomenal and absolutely immense from start to finish.
It may only be February, but you’ll struggle to find an album as heavy, as intense, as harrowing, as beautiful, as cathartic and as utterly sublime as Orchards Of A Futile Heaven all year, or for any other year come to that and let’s hope that this will be the first of many collaborations between Dis Fig and The Body.
