Bodies On Everest
A National Day Of Mourning

There was indeed a need for an album like this in the music landscape across the Channel. An album that possesses a sound as vigorous as it is original and that goes beyond the usual standards marked by a kind of renewal in the hardcore scene and the neo-psychedelic revival concentrated around the rampant and inflated Fuzz Club Records, which at this point is surely among the labels that have emerged with a certain force in recent years. A release that perfectly aligns with the standards of Cruel Nature Records, the Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK label that since 2013 has specialized in exclusively cassette releases of selected works from mostly overseas musical offerings, all characterized by a certain obsessive sound.

Recorded at Dumbulls Studio in Liverpool by Jacobia Stig, "A National Day Of Mourning" (also released on CD by Third-I-Rex) is the third album by Bodies On Everest. The album stems from content akin to drone-psychedelia and sludge, then pushes further into post-industrial regurgitations and cyberpunk settings; the reprise of a "slow-motion" incident, characterized by a certain heaviness in sounds as well as in the timing of the compositions. The opening track itself ("unreleaseddeathvideo.flac"), a kind of asynchronous radio transmission recording played at high volume, narrates typically "incidental" scenarios: a clash between a crowd of protesters and the police, a busy road, a war scene... All instrumental images where attention is drawn to detail. By narrowing our field of vision, the dynamics appear different and everything assumes a different, unreal speed that contrasts with the apparent confusion, and I think this is the fundamental concept of an album that, from the multitude, focuses on the situation of the individual and then fills with post-industrial drone scenarios like "Tally of Sevens," the noise-rock litany of "Gold Fangs In Enemy Territory," the spatial schizophrenia of "Shotgun Or Sidearm," the obsessive waves of "Suspicious Canoe," and the suburban ruins of the "Who Killed Yale Gracey?" scenario.

Ideally dedicated to an abandoned parking lot in Sarasota, Florida; a wall in Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, and a chlorine tank; the photograph of a fishing net and a fire extinguisher; a lawyer waiting for the train to arrive at the station tracks; that part of the Pacific Ocean along the coast of Chile; "A National Day of Mourning" is a collection of snapshots taken in detail. Its contents might seem indistinct, as if marked by a series of interferences, but this is true for all our perceptions, which, like radio transmitters, need to synchronize to catch every detail, and sometimes—often, in fact—this only happens if there are strong pushes in this sense. Because, in the end, every detail is part of the image as a whole and is perfectly visible in front of our eyes.