Of the Body Prone (Tzadik)

Taking the most difficult album in the history of rock as your role model isn’t an obvious strategy for success, but for Asheville, North Carolina’s Ahleuchatistas, it works.

When Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band issued Lick My Decals Off, Baby in 1970, it was met with general consternation. Yes, it built on the triumph that was the epochal Trout Mask Replica, but not in the direction Beefheart’s record company had hoped: it was weirder, harsher, more complex, and more abstract than anything that had preceded it and almost everything that followed. A few bands have explored that terrain since, but rarely as successfully as Ahleuchatistas does on Of the Body Prone, with the Decals sound—dry, spiky guitars; tumbling, polyrhythmic drums; and sculptured, monolithic bass lines—most prominent on “Owls”, “Those With Guns”, “Racing Towards the Hard Kernel”, “Eastside Uptight”, and “Making the Most of the Apocalypse”.

But this band’s no Beefheart tribute act. Ahleuchatistas modernizes its mix with loop-based postrock soundscapes, brutal passages of fuzzed-out metallic bombast, and even the occasional hint of a sweet melody in an album that makes for some of the most stimulating “difficult listening” to come this way since, well, since the Captain abandoned his ship for life as a desert painter.