The Body / VOE @ Audio, Glasgow, 22 April

Dotted inbetween the bald-headed and bearded metal-heads who are tonight's main audience are a handful of nervous-looking hipster types (this reviewer among them), tempted into the womb-like space of Audio to see if Providence, Rhode Island doom-merchants The Body will play anything from their chilling and sparse, techno-influenced album I Shall Die Here, produced by Tri-Angle beatsmith and avant garde electronic artist The Haxan Cloak. Before they take the stage, we are treated to a gloomy, somnolent performance from local mob VOE (Victims of Experience), whose brooding, intense tracks are like a duel between achingly melancholic post-rock and pitch-black death metal power-riffage. They are remarkable, powerfully dynamic, clearly winning a clutch of new fans with their emotionally wrenching and flawlessly played slabs of misery-metal.

The Body are a different proposition altogether. Drummer Lee Buford is absent from the band's UK tour, replaced by Matt Melon of Philadelphia band Pissgrave, a more than adequate stand-in. He pounds at drums and electronic pads in a blur of motion, producing contorted, lurching polyrhythms. Imposing, heavily bearded front-man Chip King sets up and loops walls of sickeningly brutal guitar noise and sampled speech, layering riffs with a deceptive complexity while screaming in a ragged, ear-piercing howl.

Vague shapes from I Shall Die Here break the surface, like the tips of icebergs, but stripped of most of Haxan's dub techno atmospherics. Instead, it is the complex tonal shifting, the sheer intensity of King's screams, and the artful formlessness of The Body's performance that stay with you, long after your ears have stopped ringing, and your stomach has stopped churning from the deep, guttural bass.