Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “Eat for Peace” from Show Me the Body.
I saw Show Me the Body years ago opening for HEALTH and another band that has since been scrubbed from consciousness for good reason. At the time, I knew nothing of the group but still make a point to be attentive to opening bands; fresh blood is the future. I was immediately taken by how each of the three instrumentalists seemed to be playing in radically different groups. The drummer had a hip-hop groove, the bassist seemed to be in a grunge group, the banjo (?!) player seemed to be in a sludge metal or noise rock band while his vocals were pure street-level punk. The mix was intoxicating. Punk in its earliest days, whether it be in New York squats or London warehouses, was a music of hybridity, uniting rock, soul, nascent hip-hop, funk, experimental music and ska in a ferocious, avant-garde but still proletariat music. Show Me the Body felt like one of the few bands still deeply in touch with that sensibility, that the barriers punk later built around itself took it away from its own powerful identity.
“Eat for Peace,” the newest single from Show Me the Body’s upcoming Alone Together, carries that same flame both musically and lyrically. On the musical end, the song owes a debt to hardcore hero Ian MacKaye, whose legendary bands Minor Threat and Fugazi clearly had an influence on this track. Lyrically, “Eat for Peace” is an explicit hymn to solidarity, the uniting love of the proletariat across lines of race, sexuality, gender and more to defend each other and defend the beauty of humanity from its worst impulses.
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It’s also a call that we cannot throw each other away even in our misdeeds, that struggle is the struggle to save each other from ourselves as much as from others. That is the spirit of punk, that communal self-defense is an act of both love and redemption, the kind that takes far more strength (and wit) than a singular violence of self-defense might. For bringing the music, the heart, and the mind, “Eat for Peace” is our Heavy Song of the Week.
Honorable Mentions
Chat Pile – “Deep Blue”
If Show Me the Body made a song about the redemptive power of radical love of community, Chat Pile released a song about the pits you can fall into that demand that power. This is not music of aggression; this is music of self-judgment. Chat Pile have always trucked in eschatology, music of the end times, largely in an inwardly spiritual sense, the way the decay of the world can seep inside and make you worse. This is not music of self-flattery, of pretending you are above a world that produces horrors. Instead, it asks you to see how things seep into each other, as painful or difficult as that might be. This is necessary.
Horse Lords – “Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!”
Former instrumental Communist math rock agitators Horse Lords suddenly took on a spiritualist veneer for their newest record Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!, out today. Here, it is less the commonality of faith and more the particularity of Posadist Christianity, a vision of heaven as star systems and planets and galactic utopias, of angels as forms of aliens, and hymnals recoded as mathematical structures broadcasted to the wild black to call out to common life. Horse Lords don’t play it for laughs. Their math rock here takes a melodious euphoric turn, a rarity for the often mind-bending group, gesturing to the desire for utopia as a pan-cultural desire for peace, for safety, for joy. They just outline it with moves that would make even fellow math rockers Angine de Poitrine furrow their brows in vexation.
Nuclear Tomb – “Epoch Inhumane”
Baltimore death/thrash weirdos Nuclear Tomb return with Epoch Inhumane, their new album trapped in the perennial vortex between tech thrash, early death metal, and the cracked prog metal of Voivod and Coroner. The title track of the record, which also acts as the album closer, is a fitting thesis for the group, a prog epic in five short minutes. You get everything from mid-tempo abstract thrash a la Voivod to raging work akin to Megadeth or Destruction, vocals on the level of rabidity as underground thrash icons Morbid Saint, and the kinds of shocking chordal choices that show the spirit of RUSH lives forever on in even (especially?) the heaviest of bands. That it features a Malcolm X quote as the close shows a keenness of social conscience, often the final factor in truly great thrash.
