What seems the strangest to you?
☐ A: The fact that The Body and Thou can collude all their beyond-distorted guitars, vocal howls, and percussive beatdowns and function in tandem as one of the most skull-crushing metal supergroups presently crushing skulls upon this earth.
☐ B: The fact that these two bands, after having tasted the destructive power of their combined ensemble, can just as easily continue to function on their own as prolific benchmarks of heaviness and compositional experimentation.
☐ C: The fact that these seven dudes got together to cover “Terrible Lie” by Nine Inch Nails.
Answer: none of these things are strange. All of them make perfect sense.
Feel free to revisit Mr. Reznor’s original version before pressing play on The Body and Thou’s rendition. Remember how sneakily those synth lines faded in behind the main riff, and hung in the back of the mix as a baroque backdrop of perverse intention? Remember how crystal-clearly the vocals sounded out over the whines of intertwined machines? Mmmmm.
Listen to The Body and Thou’s version and try not to break objects around you as your head and arms flail around in the throes of some evil ecstasy. The synths have become clipped bursts of feedback. The clean vocals have mutated into the garbled roars of madmen. The main riff… is pretty much the same, but packing a few more pounds this time around. Mmmmm.
“Terrible Lie” appears on the new The Body / Thou collaborative full length, You, Whom I Have Always Hated, due January 27 on Thrill Jockey.
• The Body: http://www.thrilljockey.com/thrill/The-Body/#.VLWWn2TF9K8
• Thou: http://noladiy.org/thou
• Thrill Jockey: http://www.thrilljockey.com/splash.html