SCALP: “NOT WORTHY OF HUMAN COMPASSION”

(Scalp‘s new album Not Worthy of Human Compassion detonated last month with help from Closed Casket Activities. We’re detonating DGR‘s review of it now.)

One of the most consistently difficult challenges in heavy metal writing is to listen to an album like Scalp’s newest release Not Worthy Of Human Compassion and then try to avoid using the word ‘abrasive’ to describe the experience within your first few sentences. Acknowledging this doesn’t make it any easier nor does it absolve one of committing said sin.

Scalp hail from a charged grindcore and powerviolence scene, one whose music was given a turbo-boost in both increasing extremity and publicity during the ‘locked in our houses with just our thoughts’ COVID-era of music. From 2020 on we saw – and this is putting it politely – a lot of projects whose main goal was to reflect the ugliness of humanity at that particular point in its history while also serving as an outlet for an expulsion of emotion that, plainly, had nowhere to go. Many groups that had already been toiling in these mines – which included a lot of crossover with the more nihilistic black metal side of things as well – suddenly had themselves launched into a semi-cultural zeitgeist and used it to full effect.

Needless to say, recent years have become a stellar nursery for albums that are outright caustic, confrontational, overwhelmingly aggressive, and nuclear-hot on the intensity front while often clocking in under the twenty-minute mark. More traditional songwriting would barely be in the fourth song by the time many of these albums have left themselves a smouldering heap on the ground. Not Worthy Of Human Compassion is the newest addition to that particular pile.

Photos by Oscar Rodriguez

Scalp hail from Southern California, though the band themselves might be spread wider across the state given their current-day more generic California locator. They’re a younger project, having launched their first demo – appropriately titled DEMO – back in 2019. In the six years since, the group have amassed a catalog of  EP-length full lengths and live releases, with Closed Casket Activities and Creator-Destructor assisting with distribution and vinyl.

Not Worthy Of Human Compassion marks the group’s fifth release overall, which at this point has the band rounding out to a nice ‘n’ comfy hour and a half (roughly) of total material. It is a face-melting and hair-raising album, with the aforementioned relentless effect of the band in play from the word ‘go’. It is a release meant to be as ugly as possible. The fusion of grind and overall violence by way of the hardcore scene results in an album of thirteen ALL-CAPS songs that couldn’t give a flying fuck about clearing the minute and a half mark too often, save for the final closing epic.

An album like Not Worthy Of Human Compassion often leaves you in a dissociative state. Writing about it does the same thing; a sub-twenty-minute run time can make a mockery of a song-analysis in any form. A track screeches past you before you can even blink, and many of the songs here are targeted blasts of violence that last as long as an actual explosion. The ‘stand up and be counted’ moment for the listener arrives more in the sense that you’re there for that expulsion of energy rather than any one specific song. Songs are more likely to stand out because they appear extra-acidic versus their regular acidic peers.

In the end, the great equalizer for any specific track on Not Worthy Of Human Compassion often comes down to whether it has a brick-breakingly heavy groove or a solid circle pit riff amidst the chaos that is otherwise being unleashed. Early on, Scalp make it clear that they’ve mastered the chaotic segment of their chosen genre but it’s the other factors that elevate the sound above ‘Chaos-plus’ that will let a song stick around.

The quicker blasts like “Loather”, “Surrogatevictim”, “Pit”, and the ever-creative “Untitled” blast by you so quick that you’d almost not notice that they broke from the song before them. They’re like standing in an open area and having a bullet sail right in front of you; you literally have no time to comprehend just how close you were to a face-to-face meeting with the reaper until midway through each one of those songs. They’re introduced like close to two-thirds of the other songs on Not Worthy Of Human Compassion, with screeching reverb and sudden maelstrom.

It’s enough of a constant shock to the system – these extremely short pieces arriving after the longer songs – that you may be practically made of electricity by the time you cross the fourth one of those. It may actually not be the voltage or the arcs across the heart that kill you when it comes to the delivery of songs like this but instead the frequency upon which you seem to be getting shocked back into consciousness.

This is of course delivered with a cheeky bit of sarcasm given that there are nearly zero moments of actual peace on Scalp’s newest. Not Worthy Of Human Compassion is an album that swears its dedication to constant violence and each lesson in a miniaturized history in it. “80ACRESOFHELL” and “CROWFOOT” are twin-flamethrowers separated by the basically two minutes of sprinting through a minefield in between known as “SHACKLEROT”. The three-song movement at that point becomes the clear foundation of Not Worthy Of Human Compassion and it is one that Scalp cycle their way back to again and again and again.

The whole furious blast of music could be viewed as one solid sub-twenty minute burst with the song titles serving as perfunctory chapter breaks at best. Breaking a song out from its brethren serves more to highlight how every song finds one solid message and delivers nothing else around it; it’s a sort of surgical proficiency that many a powerviolence band have mastered over the years, but to get the full molten experience of Not Worthy Of Human Compassion you’re likely to take three or four in at a time rather than just the one song. This is an album that will wreak hell on a sort of shuffled playlist.

A release like Not Worthy Of Human Compassion is often the musical equivalent of throwing a lit match into a tinder box. You’re going to get an explosion of flame and a sudden energetic release, but much as we can measure the destructive force of a world-ending storm though the end result is always the same, so too can we break down just how much of a starting spark to the eventual firestorm Not Worthy Of Human Compassion actually is. In this case it’s like throwing a molotov cocktail at the same tinder box. You’re well aware it’s probably overdoing it but Scalp’s whole mission is a ‘subtlety be damned’ dedication to nihilistic destruction, which is one that they clearly excel in.

Is there catharsis to be found here? Yes, in the form of abject anger and destruction. It’s where fury and fire become a passion all their own but not in the sense that it is going to ‘help’ anyone. It’s a hallmark sound for the fusion of extremity across grind, punk, and metal genres that has eventually evolved into the screaming nightmare that now rests before you, and it is one that Scalp do an excellent job of nailing their own nametag onto as well.

https://www.instagram.com/scalp.oc/