(Our writer DGR obviously had a shit-ton of fun listening to Scumbag’s new EP, and probably just as much fun coming up with the word salad needed to describe the experience. See for yourselves. And listen for yourselves.)
Every year while questing in the wilds of heavy metal we find ourselves discussing a new death metal discovery out of New York. It goes without saying that New York as a state and its surrounding areas have a deep, deep, deep history with death metal and has long codified its own regional flavoring of it with mega-sized headlining bands that seem to inspire everyone nearby. You could name the greats for days but it’s likely you’ve known your chosen few already.
One of the reliable things about the area though is that for as boneheaded and dumb as death metal can be, New York, through its adaptations of brutal death and slam, has created something that exists on polar opposite ends of the spectrum, equal parts insanely technical and impressive and just about as brain-dead as a boulder. The megalopolis city on its own is a hive of activity.
Sometimes it can feel like we’ve chosen the band from a hat – although it’s probably closer to sticking your hand into a running dishwasher – but truth is the batting average for someone who exists on an objective level of ‘good’ is very high. The standard is bred into the region.
That’s how we wound up with the band Scumbag crossing our desk, a band whose name caught our eyes long before we started connecting region to music – but it didn’t take long after listening to the first minute of their new EP Scumlord to make a fairly educated guess.
Which means that yes, today we are reviewing a band called Scumbag. The question is not so much why, as United States President William H. Macy Taft once said before slamming a Mountain Dew and driving off in a monster truck, ‘the question is why not?’.
Scumlord is a three-song EP that punches in for a twelve-minute shift and then goes home. This is an EP that finishes before some people can even be bothered to get out to their respective positions after clocking in for the day; it knocks the door off the hinges, uses the door slab as a weapon, smashes everything else in the room, and then exits by ramming into a wall and leaving a hole in it because it couldn’t figure out where it had initially entered from.
That ceremony of opposites that is the highly technical death metal side and its polar-twin of brutal death being rammed together via musical collision is what makes this genre so interesting in spite of the fact that so much of it is recognizable after about thirty seconds.
The big, imperial riffs that inevitably become so over-picked they sound like bags of scraping and mud, segueing into highly-efficient and painstaking guitar sweeps and brain-bending solos while the rhythm section seems to declare war on everything around them including the concept of music itself. The quarry-blasting and rolls may be so precisely on time that public transit finds itself turning red with envy, but the rattling of the kit remains so loud and cacophonous that you become a musical Indiana Jones, the only one to truly discover what was happening inside of the temple the entire time after so many had turned away.
But, how does one discuss the merits of the opening song when the opening song is called “Facefuck” without acknowledging the havoc that is about to be wreaked on your search engine discoverability because of it – and it isn’t even among the ten worst things we’ve likely covered over the years for this site, especially given our propensity to giggle at the more cerebrum-scarring band names out there, yet there’s still some puritan sensibilities that find themselves offended running deep in the recesses of the mind, causing subconscious screw-face when you have to keep typing the title as a reference point.
“Facefuck” is, hilariously, the shortest song of the three present on the Scumlord EP, perhaps a larger unspoken struggle with endurance in the act taking place here, but also because it has a tall order ahead of it, as it has to basically introduce band, album, philosophy, and then brutalize you over the course of all three.
Thus, the shock at the title comes first – which works in your favor in large groups sometimes – and from there you are attacked over and over again with murk-spewing death metal guitar and guttural vocals that could serve as a solid sound system tester as they cover all the low frequencies. Musical altruism approached in the same subtle way that world politics might be approached by a twelve-year-old.
It will likely disappoint people to know that the gentlemen behind Scumbag are not offering a philosopher’s view of the world but perhaps the overly complicated near-five-minutes of “Mindful Mutilation” could help make some amends. Embracing the more technical side of the band’s sound, “Mindful Mutilation” is a song jammed to the brim with material, rapid-speed-switches, and militaristic march to its grooves.
Defeated Sanity will likely remain unbeaten in the realms of full-blown cerebral brutal death metal but Scumbag are taking a hell of a shot at moving through basically the entirety of the brutal death genre on its own in the time they’re allowed on “Mindful Mutilation”. The near-core-esque groove that spills into a world-ending battle atmosphere on the guitar front halfway through the song makes for a fun and viewpoint-morphing turn.
It’s not often you get lost in a song in the span of five seconds but the sudden turn into a completely different style of death metal pulls down the mask of knuckle-dragging pit destruction that the opening song and band name would initially suggest. It does a high-wire act of staying between tech-death and technically proficient death metal, but in the end, “Mindful Mutilation” is the song that is worth the price of admission of the three that make up Scumlord.
Although, the titular “Scumlord” song does take an absolute stab at it by traveling down similar paths as the song just prior to it. The incredibly up-front guitar solo is both appreciated and ungodly loud in comparison to the rest of the song but it drifts into space-psychedelic territory for a bit and you wonder if perhaps Scumbag themselves are entering a chrysalis period leading into something equally more vicious and more ‘intelligent’ sounding in their future.
Scumlord starts off unable to finish a three-letter crossword puzzle but by the time the EP wraps up twelve minutes later you’ll have an idea that Scumbag may stealthily be insanely talented behind the murderous obsession and dirtbag name. Again, it is reflective of that sort of ‘existing on opposite poles’ style that brutal death has adopted over the years. Some of the smartest, most insanely technical music turned into the most caveman sounding music possible.
Explaining it to people can often boil down to ‘this is the dumb riff for people to run around to’ before the band then spend the next two minutes moving their hands so fast up and down the fretboard that your brain can’t register it fast enough.
Hailing absolute stupidity and absolute genius in equal measure, Scumbag are immensely ambitious on their twelve minutes of Scumlord, divvying out a variety of promising ideas for the future while also showing off that you can in fact ram basically a genre’s worth of music into almost five minutes on an EP… twice.
https://scumbagny.bandcamp.com/album/scumlord
https://www.facebook.com/p/Scumbag-Death-Metal-61567899511575/