Dope Body – Lifer

Dope Body’s Lifer wears the fug of the band’s rehearsal room – the Baltimore four-piece barely left it while thrashing this record into shape. They took a similar approach to 2012’s Natural History, but where that album revelled in a tightly hewn tautness, Lifer is more interested in dynamics. Intro promises of the kind of opening salvo that live would have tops off and torsos colliding; but follow-up Repo-Man initially toys with the idea, withdrawing before eventually coming through with a suitably full-throttled chorus.

It sets the stage for an album that veers further away from the group’s noise rock paradigm than ever before, Rare Air being particularly notable for its almost post-punk-sounding spindly guitar lines. Even In the End’s more typical, but in its thunderously hammered-out repetition it too suggests another direction; but then it’s that constant questioning of their sound even as they hurtle purposefully forward that makes Dope Body so exciting.