Rapper, actor and occasional media celebrity, Ice-T’s heavy metal band, Body Count have been around since the early ‘90s and have turned out some fine albums along the way – most notably their self-titled debut and 2014’s Manslaughter. Unfortunately, their latest offering, Merciless is unlikely to be viewed as a career high point, as it sees Ice and his buddies hit a musical dead end with some considerable force.
At its best, Body Count’s sound is loud, antagonistic and seriously heavy but gritty and with a sly sense of humour that frequently leans into machismo without lurching into idiocy. On Merciless, however, all the rough edges have been removed for what seems to be a soulless ChatGBT approximation of a Body Count album. One that sounds like it might have been expressly written to soundtrack a shoot ‘em up computer game with slasher movie overtones.
Merciless takes itself far too seriously from the off, as it dives straight into the torture porn of “Interrogation”. Throughout the album though, Ice-T’s macho posturing frequently comes across as a testosterone overdose backed by music that is always turned up to 11 and is far too over-produced, with occasional death metal roars and screams from George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher and Joe Bad. However, it’s on Ice’s re-write of “Comfortably Numb”, which features David Gilmour himself soloing wildly, that things reach peak pomposity. Here, Ice-T digs deep into his well of wisdom to become the Yoda of Emo with a sermon that claims humans no longer have any real empathy for each other because of the media, over consumption and drug use – but that he cares about us all.
It’s a shame that his lyrics have become so preposterous because Ice’s heart is clearly in the right place. He just might consider expanding the free time that he doesn’t spend either watching slasher movies or killing people on his X-Box before he starts writing the lyrics for Body Count’s next album.
