Album Review: Body Void Is Relentless on ‘Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth’
The New England noise doom duo bring their staticky, dread-inducing metal to the topics of the climate emergency and anti-racism.
Written by Felix Kalvesmaki
Photo courtesy of Benjamin Collins
Body Void’s 2021 release Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth doesn’t mince words. The album’s four songs, each spanning over 10 minutes in length, seethe with anger and anguish. Drummer Edward Holgerson paces the opening cut “Wound” at a slow creep, while instrumentalist and vocalist Willow Ryan makes her guitar groan and bass brood. Things pick up speed as blast beats and low, chugging notes briefly caffeinate the track, but soon enough, the band is back to its unrelenting howls. The opening track makes the album’s themes abundantly clear: “Your wealth / Won’t save you / This planet / Is not yours / You coward / Your system / Is over.”
The duo specialize in doom metal, a subgenre of heavy metal that seeks to invoke a sense of impending doom into its listeners. Combine that with their affinity for noise — industrial noise artist Entresol provides electronics on the record — and you get roughly an hour of bleak, screechy, and harsh ruminations concerning the climate emergency. It’s an acquired taste, but Body Void delivers it with expertise.
The riffs on this record are sedated and deliberate. Guitars playing one note at a time over drums here, a sharp and swiping riff there. Sometimes, the songs build up a bunch of bluesy crunch that honors the history of the genre, dropped way down into what sounds like the lowest notes possible. It builds a stormy atmosphere that is perhaps the closest one can come to encapsulating the dread of a dying world. Earth heating up half a degree, an oddball blizzard in Texas: This apocalypse doesn’t come in spades; it comes at a slow march. This record stares that onslaught in the face, and it doesn’t look away, for better or worse.
But this album is not all trudging in the sludge — as fun as that may be. This is music thick with smog. The end of “Laying Down In A Forest Fire” brings a brutal punk beat to scorching guitars and smoking bass. The song immolates itself in a rage as it imagines a world reborn in the embers of revolution: “We’ve lit the flame / Your bed is alight / My bet is you’ll turn / To ash before you fight / With you out the way / We’ll regrow from ashes.” The song ends with downtrodden flickers of feedback and static, dying out as all flames do.
Image courtesy of Prosthetic Records
As if the project wasn’t hardcore enough, cue “Fawn,” a track that describes what sounds like a doe fallen victim to radiation. The song’s titular deer becomes a metaphor for the consequences of the way humanity has treated Earth and its inhabitants. “Carry the fawn / It has two heads / Its lifeless form / Looking back at you / With glassy eyes / Melding / With your frame (…) / You are the fawn / It grows inside you / It will outlive you / You will not be reborn.” This song is another instance of Body Void keeping their sludge fresh: Around seven and a half minutes in, the entire song breaks into a sprint. Sandpapery riffs and wailing feedback announce this interlude, with drumming going at a breakneck pace as Ryan screams out the dark reality that awaits.
Themes of anti-racism run across closer “Pale Man” as Ryan cries, “Pale man, he comes / He’s headed this way / He’ll enter your house / And claim it’s his own / He wants you to know / You are beneath him / Four hundred years / He asks to be carried.” Despite this record’s irreverent intensity, it still manages to feel like a climax, as the duo continues to command attention through the track’s all-encompassing distortion. When things quiet down halfway through, the band has taught listeners to expect the loudest to come afterwards, and it does. Played any louder than a whisper, and it might blow the speakers — or at least sound like it.
Body Void conquers the genres of doom and sludge on their latest effort, and in doing so, pack a damn good punch on the topics of racism and environmentalism. It’s an incredible effort that stretches beyond gloom and turns into something that is, at times, unsettling and disturbing.