“Conspire to find the ending of me.“
Orange County deathviolence quartet Scalp return with their latest full-length album, the feedback-soaked Not Worthy of Human Compassion. Clocking in at a staggering 20 minutes, Scalp are most certainly not here to indulge in their egos or experiment, delivering 13 tracks (plus a hidden track!) of pure short-and-sharp hardcore.
The album kicks off with the sludgy, droning “LTARMLAC”, which features audio from 1967 anti-LSD propaganda film ‘The Hippie Temptation’ as the backdrop to the band’s ominous drone into life. Immediately, listeners will be reminded of the intro track from Dystopia’s self-titled album, “Now and Forever”, a similar track that features audio from Eckhart Tolle’s audiobook ‘The Power of Now’. “LTARMLAC” acts as a great opener, setting the dark, dystopian mood for the next eighteen-and-a-half minutes.
“LTARMLAC” quickly transitions into “EGODEATH”, throwing us into the deep end with barely time enough to gasp a breath before Scalp begin to pummel your face in. The band sound great here – Devan Fuentes has those HM-2 chainsaw guitar tones nailed, Cole Sattler’s rumbling bass rivals even Sleep’s Al Cisneros, and all is centred around the belligerent drums of Luke Smith, who surely goes through drumheads like packets of chewing gum. At the helm of it all, Cole Rodgers’ disdaining vocals – so in-your-face that you can smell his breath, bringing a serrated edge to Scalp’s sonic strike.
Much like the band’s debut Domestic Extremity, Not Worthy of Human Compassion has a very loose, live feeling to it, perhaps leaning into hardcore-adjacent genres’ strengths within the live setting. Despite each track utterly seething with screaming feedback, the band still sound super locked in, polished, and well-rehearsed – but never lifelessly quantised, either. Not Worthy of Human Compassion isn’t exactly an evolution – but who asked for one? Scalp still deliver electrifying, hard-hitting, death-tinged hardcore, capturing their sheer energy on tape in a way that even forefathers like Black Flag simply never could.
With that said, the album certainly has its standouts. “80ACRESOFHELL” is sure to be a pit-starter live, with a hefty slowdown section sandwiched between two off-the-rails room-spinners. The guitars and drums hacking their way back in The Shining-style during the drop-out section, Rodgers ululates: “Believe your country’s lies/about your foreign enemy!”.
Neighbours “LOATHER” and “SURROGATEVICTIM” are others among standouts of Not Worthy of Human Compassion. Welded roughly together by uncontainable, blaring feedback and coming to barely a minute and a half between them, Scalp here deliver two short bursts of aggression that prove the band are not interested in messing around.
“LOATHER” abruptly launches right into things, sparing not even a second for anything even vaguely resembling an intro section. We are immediately battered by Luke Smith with a blast beat amidst a wall of angry noise, soon alternating into a short D-beat section and then back to blasting. You could certainly say Smith holds the reigns, dictating the feel and flow of the music, but Scalp don’t really have reigns, moving more as one, for maximum impact.
“SURROGATEVICTIM” screeches into its 35-second life, never letting up for a second. “SURROGATEVICTIM” almost feels like being suffocated, fighting for your life. Once again, Smith’s relentless drumming keeps the intensity high whilst the rest of the band rip and tear over the top. I noted Smith’s clever and musical decision to alternate into a different high-intensity drum pattern around the middle of the track in order to prevent the track from becoming boring or one-note.
The interesting thing regarding the lengths of not just “LOATHER” and “SURROGATEVICTIM”, but all tracks on Not Worthy of Human Compassion, is that they aren’t just short for the sake of shock value, they are exactly as long as they need to be. Scalp should be commended for this, cutting absolutely all the excess from their music in order to deliver only the purest, hardest-hitting death-twined powerviolence.
On a production front, the band again don’t stray too far outside the stylistic status quo. The guitars are double-tracked and hard-panned left and right, making an otherwise very mono mix sound less narrow. A lot of compression is at play, most notably on Rodgers’ vocals, which are super compressed in order to push him as far into your face as possible. The producer does a great job with the drum sound here; the kick has plenty of weight to it, as well as a good helping of that 2kHz attack that helps it to cut through. The snare is a perfect mix of that poingy slam snare and a boxier sound with some body, and is blended with a touch of room mic. This lifts the snare a little by giving it some space within a super claustrophobic mix. As you might expect, the songs are all mastered as loud as possible, which is a stylistic choice that suits the music well and assists in keeping the energy high.
To conclude, the sound of Orange County deathviolence outfit Scalp’s latest effort Not Worthy of Human Compassionis perhaps best summed up by single “CONSPIRACY”: a no-holds-barred, barrelling assault, crying out with feedback that builds anxious anticipation and swiftly closed out by a crushingly heavy breakdown like the final blow in an angry fist fight – all this in barely over a minute. Scalp certainly waste not a second of the 20-minute runtime of Not Worthy of Human Compassion, approaching composition with an obviously very punk ethos and attitude; nothing takes a second longer than it has to, no words are minced, and no punches are pulled. The record’s production does a fantastic job of delivering a polished record disguised as a rough-and-tumble hardcore gig; barely held together by duct tape and safety pins.
Though the music itself largely reflects punk extremity through the heavy lens of sludge bands like Dystopia and Eyehategod (who themselves of course had their own punk angles,) Scalp are happy to lean into this heavier side, perhaps most obvious on the immensely heavy RIGORVIVUS. With that said, it is the band’s clear admiration for punk that separate them from contemporaries like Nails and Full of Hell, who come from a place more sonically rooted in the metal realm. Scalp certainly have mastered their sound, and have once again delivered a fantastic album that showcases their music and vibe perfectly.
8/10
Not Worth Of Human Compassion is out July 25th via Closed Casket Activities, and can be pre-ordered here.