ABSENT IN BODY, the new band featuring AMENRA guitarist Mathieu J. Vandekerckhove, AMENRA frontman Colin H. Van Eeckhout, NEUROSIS vocalist/guitarist Scott Kelly and former SEPULTURA drummer Igor Cavalera, will release its debut album, "Plague God", on March 25 via Relapse Records. The LP's second single, "Sarin", can be streamed below.
Van Eeckhout comments: "Humanity its demise as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The onslaught of information is not manageable for any empathic organism in this universe. Driven into a corner, overtaken by our own self-destructive ways, nature sends its beasts to settle things for good. Restore balance by fire, water, earth and wind. Until eventually mankind will eat itself. Facts are no longer facts, and science appears to have been driven from its throne by new gods of unintelligible information. The story told by a new breed, all awhile Sarin will sleep in your lungs tonight.
"The scream is mine. So loud. But no one came. A funeral pyre. Flames so high they burn the sky. The awful pain. Everywhere. On Gods domain. The coming rain. It will swallow everything.
"'Sarin' is also a direct hommage to Dwid Hellion, whom has written a song with INTEGRITY of the same title, without him we would never have been introduced to one another, and AIB would never have seen the light of day."
"Plague God" is bound by the same ideals of unity and fearlessly uncompromising honesty of expression that have driven the members' respective bands to imperious heights of reverence and groundbreaking sonic deliverance. "Plague God" is by turns devastating and sublime, drawn from musicians for whom life and art are inextricably bound.
Vandekerckhove commented: "We had not imposed any limitations or boundaries on ourselves to create this music. Everything happened without any compromise, we gathered and let inspiration run freely. It is the beauty and the strength of this album."
Cavalera stated: "It feels great to collaborate with such forward-thinking minds like Colin, Mathieu and Scott on ABSENT IN BODY. The music is dense and slowly brutal, very similar to the times we are living."
"The Acres/The Ache" music video was filmed and edited by Vandekerckhove.
"Plague God" track listing:
01. Rise From Ruins
02 In Spirit In Spite
03. Sarin
04. The Acres/The Ache
05. The Half Rising Man
In an era overrun by information, misinformation, unseen algorithms and viral contagion, to seek out what’s truly human in the face of overwhelming and unfathomable forces has perhaps become our most sacred of tasks. It’s an impulse that lies at the very heart of "Plague God".
Initially the brainchild of Vandekerckhove and Kelly, ABSENT IN BODY formed in 2017. Immediately recognizing their kinship, and with Van Eeckhout brought in on vocals and bass, what emerged is a reflection of the intervening years of turbulence, extending its scope as it navigates across five stretches of unstable terrain. From the opening "Rise From Ruins" with Cavalera's tribal beat emerging from foreboding, near-subsonic oscillations to explode in a tide of corrosive riffs and feral howls, through "Sarin"'s steadfast, procession-through-purgatory groove, to "The Half Rising Man"'s matrix of organic/mechanic evolution, it's an album in constant dialogue between the animalistic, the human and the industrial, and a hunger to distill a truth, something unpolluted from the fray.
Protest music is often perceived as a petition, or a counter-argument against a controlling force. There is another sense of protest, though, that of a machine under stress: articulating the pressures weighing down on it by means of an involuntary, primal response. It's these states of critical mass at which we must truly find ourselves, under duress maybe, but unblinded and alive. "Plague God" doesn't just give voice to these moments of truth, but in the band's deep kinship integral to every claustrophobic judder, every stretch of atmospheric dread and helpless alias assumed, lies a freedom we both forget and attain at our peril.
