DAS VILLAIN
Kim Gordon shows and proves that in a Post-SY world, she still kicks serious ass! With Body/Head, Kim and Bill Nace carve out an unconventional cacophony of improvisation, pure noise, and avant-jazz coupled with sparse-and in many instances cavernous industrial soundscapes-that's avant-garde sans the pretense and rock clichés.
Favorite track: You Don't Need.
thenewspaper
Really runs the rungs for most impressive ladder--a Classic Industrial grind to it, with the kind of tripped out vocal pacing that haunts the mind, more than is remembered by it.
Favorite track: Last Time.
Creative alchemy doesn’t just happen in the studio or in the practice space; so much of it is the product of solo time with one’s instrument, learning how body and wood and electronics fuse, and of subconscious processes as one lives one’s daily life—picking up the ambient noise of the world outside, listening to others’ work, talking through ideas with friends. For Kim Gordon and Bill Nace, time together these days is limited to live performances and recording, so they’ve got to bring all their magic to every encounter. Lucky for us, these are two experimental sorcerers of significant renown.
Their debut album together as Body/Head, Coming Apart, from 2013, was more of a rock record—heavy, emotional, cathartic, spellwork in shades of black and grey. The Switch is their second studio full-length, and it finds the duo working with a more subtle palette, refining their ideas and identity. Some of it was sketched out live (if you’ve not had the fortune of seeing them in that natural environment yet, see 2016’s improvisational document No Waves), but much of it happened purely in the moment. Working in the same studio and with the same producer as Coming Apart, here Body/Head stretch out, making spacious pieces that build shivering drones, dissonant interplay, Gordon’s manipulated vocals, and scraping, haunting textures into something that feels both delicate and dangerous. Less discrete songs than one composition broken up into thematic movements, a slow-moving narrative that requires as much attention and care from the listener as it did from everyone involved in its creation, it is a record that sticks around after it’s done playing.
This is Nace’s favorite of Gordon’s guitar work; she’s truly come into her own as a guitarist, having built up her confidence through solo shows. The way the duo work together, you’d never know they spend so much time apart; on The Switch, their vision and focus feel truly unified. If Coming Apart was dark magic, The Switch works with light, though it never forgets that these approaches are two sides of the same coin, and that binaries—black/white, near/far, emotion/analysis, body/head—are made to be broken open, and that the truth of things is in the energy between.
-Jes Skolnik, May 2018
credits
released July 13, 2018
Vocals – Kim Gordon
Guitars – Kim Gordon, Bill Nace
All songs by Body/Head
Published by Forgetful Songs (BMI) and Onenote Music (BMI)
Recorded July 2017 at Sonelab Studios in Western, MA
Engineered by Justin Pizzoferrato
Mixed by Body/Head and Justin Pizzoferrato
Mastered by John Golden
Photos by Vice Cooler
Art Direction by Mike Zimmerman
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Deep, mind-bending psych. I don't know how it was put together, but it feels very organic, like early Nurse With Wound. I could see Gordon, Dilloway, and Nace sitting among a pile of junk and miles of tape, splicing together this album piece by piece. Levrikon