Enemy of Love

The Bodys 2019 release Remixed included a chest-rattling techno rework of the song "Adamah," which was done by AJ Wilson, a Los Angeles-based artist who goes by the name OAA. Three years later, a full collaboration between the Body and OAA appeared, and its an entirely different beast than the previous remix, which was filled with looped, mangled voices set to four-on-the-floor beats. Enemy of Love is much closer to the Bodys usual wheelhouse, with most of the songs featuring slow, lurching rhythms and piercing shrieks, but this album has slightly more of an electronic crunch to it, making it a logical continuation of the death industrial sound of 2021s Ive Seen All I Need to See. An undercurrent of suspenseful electronic pulsations runs through the opener "Devalued," pounded into dust by bludgeoning drums and brain-numbing distortion. The abrasive yet spacious "Pseudocyesis" approaches a fusion of dub and black metal, with choppy edits adding to the songs disorienting feel. This track and others like "Fortified Tower" incorporate jittering electronic percussion sequences that suggest the forward momentum of techno without fully committing to the style -- "Miserable Freedom" comes closest to breaking out into a 4/4 stomp, but it never arrives. "Barren of Joy" is the albums outlier, with raw synth riffs sporadically slashing through a landfill of guitar sludge and truly stomach-turning growling by Full of Hells Dylan Walker. Theres barely any drums until the second half of the song, and when they do arrive, theyre diced into stuttering fits. "Ignorant Messiah" shoots a few rays of laser gun synth into a churning rhythm, and "Docile Gift" revisits the experimentation with trap-style drum programming on previous Body records like 2016s No One Deserves Happiness. Unlike the earlier remix, Enemy of Love ends up sounding far more like a Body album than one of OAAs solo releases, but it manages to add a different shade of postindustrial dread to the groups usual sound. ~ Paul Simpson