Body Mena - Prayer In Dub - VINYL LP

Body Mepa is the New York-based quartet of Greg Fox (drums), Sasha Frere-Jones (guitar), Melvin Gibbs (bass), and Grey McMurray (guitar). As luminaries in the intersecting traditions of improvised music, rock, jazz, fusion, and contemporary classical music, the four artists have each spent decades building diverse practices that extend beyond sound into multiple disciplines. Prayer in Dub, their second on Hausu Mountain, follows the bands 2020 album The Work Is Slow. The album presents a band whose collective intuition as instrumentalists and live-in-the-room songwriters has deepened with each take that they put to tape. Prayer in Dub finds Body Mepa taking up new experiments with song structure and atmosphere, fanning out into a wide menu of both longer and more concise pieces that suggest deliberate shifts in energy and emotional resonance. The album presents a thrilling contrast between storms of precise rhythmic interplay and slowly expanding fields of multi-guitar and bass texture, alternately pushing the narrative toward explosive peaks of intensity and dipping into ambient expanses. Contemplative guitar lines, both bone dry and effected into total abstraction, ripple together over dub-indebted rhythm section grooves before shifting the dial towards beatific twang. Knotty distorted solos surge out of the fray over networks of arpeggios and drum fills. On Prayer in Dub, Body Mepa pursues a strain of euphoria charged with elegiac grandeur and the looming potential to crumble at any moment under the psychic weight of confusion. It speaks to the bands goals and general outlook that chaos never completely consumes their sessions. The band channels the kinetic energy of a InchsupergroupInch of veteran musicians into communal works that evolve beyond their creators extensive pedigrees into new forms both intimate in sentiment and majestic in scope.