Album Review: Body Count - Merciless
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Not content with giving us one of the tours of the year back in the summer, when Ice and company laid waste to venues up and down the country, but Body Count are rounding out 2024 with what surely must be a contender for what must be one of the albums of the year.
Having been victims of the global pandemic when releasing 2020’s Carnivore album just as the world closed down, Body Count seem to have channelled all that anger and aggression into the making of Merciless. As on the tour, here is a band uncompromising in their intent and unwavering in their dedication to their cause.
The intro track, Interrogation, is a short, piece in which a nameless individual inflicts pain on a victim; the ominous samples and bass beats reveal more of the intention of the assailant – who we might well meet again later – when he admits “I have no mercy…” leading into the album’s title track.
Merciless is all about the down and dirty grooves and Ice’s Hip Hop vocals. Fat riffs chug away slowly and an ominous chorus, full of street attitude, unveil an overarching theme of the album, should you choose to hear it in that manner, of control and systems of control employed by nefarious actors.
There’s a distinct Slayer sound to the mid-section, as Ernie C and Juan Garcia do their best King- Hanneman harmonics into a slow, yet excoriating solo. Those Slayerism show their faces several times on the first half of the record, mostly in the execution of the main riffs of Purge, Psychopath and Live Forever.
Featuring a guest vocal from Cannibal Corpse’s George Fisher, Purge takes the idea of the film series and considers what they would look like in reality. Pummelling drum, curtesy of Will Dorsey, lay a foundation for some mammoth string-bends. Psychopath could be a return of the torturer of the intro, finding Ice going all Tom Araya and recruiting Fit for an Autopsy’s Joe Bad to lend a backing vocal.
To complete this triptych, Live Forever is the album’s most ‘Metal’ moment, blasting from the outset and giving some heavy grooves, yet offering a darkly gothic sounding chorus and some skipping beats, with Howard Jones’ distinct voice added to the final section.
Both Lying Motherfuka and Drug Lords find Vincent Price’s bass being used to great effect in these trenchant attacks on politicians and those who would foist destructive pharmaceuticals onto an unsuspecting populus; those could be either cartels peddling fentanyl, or companies with some ‘miracle cure.’
But Ice is a rapper and although Body Count lands in the Crossover genre, the Hip Hop must rear its head at several points. World War and Do or Die weave themselves with more of Ice’s day-job elements than most of the rest of Merciless, as he warns of the threat of global annihilation and the complex relationship of the United States and guns.
More overtly in the Hip Hop camp is the blistering attack on the two-party political system in America, Fuck What You Heard, which suggests such a system is more harmful to the general population that street gangs; Ice even coins the labels ‘Democrips’ and ‘Bloodpublicans’ to explain his point. The idea that both are out to divide and conquer, deliberately setting communities and even families against each other, all while they profit, is neatly summed up in the line: “winds on the same bird.”
Final track, Mic Contract, is built from some massive Hip Hop grooves and Sean E Sean’s samples; against pulsing percussion and fat guitars it’s a tune that you simply don’t want to end.
I’ve deliberately left the cover of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb until the end of this review, even though it sits toward the middle of the record. As a huge Floyd fan – and it having been played on tour – I was interested to hear what the recorded version was going to be like and – it has to be said – I think this is one of the finest covers of this song I’ve ever heard.
Body Count make it their own from the get-go, meta morphing the subject from an individual in a downward spiral to a society in a self-inflicted dive to annihilation. Everything Ice-T has done to date can be summed up in this six-minute masterpiece; it’s a big shout, but I’ll stand by it. When David Gilmour invites himself to play on the track, you know you’re on to a winner.
Ice, accompanied by son, Little Ice, manage the vocals across Merciless with aplomb, laying down the unique sound and musical vision of T et al.
Album number eight is a superb collection and demonstrates a band as pissed off in 2024 as they were back in 1992.
