(((O))) : Intensive Care & The Body – Was I Good Enough?

The Body‘s collaborative works have long since outnumbered the ones they make by themselves and this latest, with death industrial duo Intensive Care, lands with a familiar thud. It is heavy, it is grimy. Was I Good Enough? It asks. If you were to generalise based on previous evidence, or even a cursory glance down the tracklist, I think you know that the answer is a weary “No”. Things have not taken a surprise turn towards pumped-up positivity, rather the self-doubt implicit in the question and all its demon buddies are here again, running free. It is dark and wounded and dread soaked.

A few month’s back Intensive Care’s Andrew Nolan put out an album with noted The Body collaborators Full Of Hell and so this hook up, while not inevitable, is certainly not hugely surprising. Knowing the parties involved then, the results are pretty much exactly what you expect, an abrasive industrial hellscape with screaming. It’s not that I was hoping for rainbows and cupcakes or a Charli XCX feature, it’s more that they have so often found ways to shape shift and side step convention that at first it falls a little flat just by being itself.

Novelty is overrated in music though and there are plenty of interesting subtleties that reveal themselves on a closer listen. ‘Mistakes Have Been Made’ kicks right in with Chip King’s unearthly howl and drums that are slow to the point of stopping, momentum set to trudge. It opens up a little for Nolan’s vocal to come in but there’s a lot of space in the mix, as if we’re in the relatively calm centre of things as the sound scrapes around the walls. ‘Swallowed by the God’ is a head nodder, picking up the pace a step and throwing in some clanking metal.

The story is that The Body sent over the rough work for an album to which Intensive Care added parts and then chopped and screwed the results. So there’s a cut and paste sense to it with chunks of noise flying around and even a sickly dub space. The lurch and growling vocals of the first part of  ‘At Death’s Door’ dissolve into an atmospheric middle section settling into a dubbed storm. Over the album’s first half the drums are often so pushed apart in chopped sections there’s hardly any forward motion but on the perfectly entitled ‘Cartography of Suffering’ Lee’s drums finally start to kick up some energy among the thick distorting buzz.

The final track ‘Mandelbrot Anamnesis’ is the record’s crowning gem. Self doubting questions echoing around inside your skull, “Do you feel like your body is not your own? Do you think this looks like self care? Do you ever feel like it’s all your fault?” On and on multiplying and overlapping until a few discreet notes of church organ bring everything crashing in screaming and rolling in the pain and distortion. It possibly needs to be at insane volume on a huge system for the full overwhelm to hit you but it’s great on headphones. It eventually becomes a completely frying overload for a couple of minutes, finally blowing out into a blasted landscape of moaning grey drones. Reliably caustic but cathartic then.