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Review/ Bodychoke: "Cold River Songs"

  Tobias

The Relapse reissue of Bodychoke’s final album, originally vomited messily forth in 1997, throws the English band’s raincoat wide open, reprinting the lyrics in all their it-puts-the-lotion-in-the-basket ignominy – all sorts of psycho-circus consciousness streams pertaining to chicks tied up in closets, happy stuff like that.

The musical engine is similarly end-of-days, the voice a fusion of Frank Black (the yells) and Figurine (the google-eyed mumbling between the yells), the stubbornly headbanging guitars and splashy drums paying homage to Big Black, old-time Alice Cooper and Ministry. As it were, this is at last revealed as a loosely conceptual undertaking: boy meets girl, boy kidnaps and tortures girl, boy stands trial and exclaims, like George Burns facing 100 years of age, that oh, yeah, I’d like to do it again.

Funny that this was released prior to the birth of the torture-porn industry of our, you know, enlightened age – a prescient musical vision of the curious verist fascinations that eventually made Hostel as American as Donald Duck. But may I say “fricking yuck already”

By Eric Saeger

Homepage: Relapse Records