It’s hard to describe just how revolutionary Body Count were when they released their eponymously-titled debut album in 1992. In an age that was polarised between the fantasy world of glam and the naval-gazing of grunge, this Los Angeles crew added a brutal realism to heavy metal and dragged it, kicking and screaming, towards a new future. An uncompromising career has found the band feeding off the world’s injustices to deliver a sound that’s remained razor sharp and on point. Album number eight, the aptly-titled Merciless, finds the band as angry as ever to deliver a record that smokes like fresh kill.
That Body Count still sound relevant becomes immediately obvious from opening track ‘Interrogation’. With Ice T rapping over a discordant guitar, it appears like a bullet between your eyes, it arrives without warning and is all the more powerful for it. An unsettling introduction that finds the listener strapped to a chair whilst Ice T screams in our face with spittle flying, it acts as an ominous portent of what’s to come over the next 40-minutes. Seguing nicely into the title track, it makes the perfect one-two punch, a jab followed by a right hook, and no matter how desensitised you are to heavy music, this combination has the power to floor even the most hardened metalhead.
Body Count are smart enough to play to their strengths and they give their fans exactly what they want and subsequently there are songs about horror films (the thrash-tastic ‘Purge’ featuring Cannibal Corpse’s George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher), the criminally insane (‘Psychopath’) and gang warfare (‘Drugs Lords’). However, Body Count often throw curveballs into their albums and this time around it’s a cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’. Putting their own indelible stamp on such a canonical song is a brave move but it’s one that really works and gets the seal of approval from Floyd’s David Gilmour who adds a typically ethereal solo that contrasts nicely with Ice’s raw words.
As an old school metalhead I was always partial to rap (it was what Anthrax’s Scott Ian termed “metal without guitars”) and it seemed that in the golden age of hip hop metal was sampled by rappers exclusively. Sure, there was the rare cross-pollination (Aerosmith/Run-D.M.C., Beastie Boys/Kerry King) but it took Body Count to pull all the strands together into a cohesive whole and Merciless remains the perfect amalgamation of metal and rap; the power of metal but without the cheesy lyrics and the visceral nature of rap delivered over potent heavy metal. The two fuse perfectly in explosive closer ‘Mic Contract’, a biting piece of music that suggests this crew are just getting warmed up.
Merciless. Undoubtedly.
- Merciless is released via Century Media Records on 22nd November 2024.
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Track List:
1. Interrogation
2. Merciless
3. Purge
4. Psychopath
5. Fuck What You Heard
6. Live Forever
7. Do Or Die
8. Comfortably Numb
9. Lying Motherfuka
10. Drugs Lords
11. World War
12. Mic Contract
