Body of Research "Vehicle Wasting Away" LP

"Vehicle Wasting Away" Remastered by Josh Stevenson at Otic Sound. Edition of 110 Hand-Stamped copies with paste-on artwork and insert in MTS generic label sleeves.

"Body of Research make ritual music for a blasted world. Their songs are set in western Pennsylvania’s slag heaps and train tunnels, bat calls and bogs. This isn’t metaphor—the band’s angular thunder begins its life through plein air recordings, the outcome of relentless hike and exploration. Vehicle Wasting Away is backboned by these battery-powered sessions taped in cemeteries, shooting ranges and backwoods. And although decay haunts the songs, the record has a steady momentum which speaks more to the ramble that led to these locations than to the locations themselves. Emerson’s “the journey, not the destination” for post-industrial rust belt decline.

The reverence that Body of Research pays to this exploration is voiced through hypnotic, ominous hooks. A patient vastness, an unblinking persistence that echoes open sky and insect storm. A melodic pressure that pulls and abrades. These hooks are ornamented in wonder and curiosity: wistful guitar work, feathery drum fills, burbling streams of sound. The band's deep faith in variation—in the restless exploration of pattern—is an elegant counterbalance to the desolation. Birdsong woven through the tolling of a bell? Bob Weston jamming with Jewels of Thought-era Pharoah Sanders? Vehicle Wasting Away speaks a devotion that is eternal yet locked into 21st century waste. Commanding yet liberatory. Eerie yet comforting. "

-Ethan Swan