Album Review: Scalp – Domestic Extremity
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Domestic Extremity is the debut album from Southern Californian metallic hardcore quartet, Scalp, and is an exercise in raging against the machine of the modern world. Taking their influences from the broad spectrum of the extreme music scene, whether that be the technicality of death metal, the ferocious assault of grinding power violence or the political indignation of punk and hardcore, Scalp look to examine the soul of their nation, and what they find is not pretty.
Most of Domestic Extremity’s ten tracks begin with feedback, giving the album the visceral sense of being played live which, in turn, gives a greater weight to the proceedings. Clocking in at a little over twenty-minutes, Scalp waste no time in establishing their parameters of hostility; No Hope brings together a slow drum, a low guitar chug and a deep bass rumble upon which snarling, growling vocals can spit its bile.
There is very much a death metal undercurrent to the early tracks on the album, the whirlwind drumming and screeching guitar establishing the effect of doom and despair. That’s not to say Scalp have gone full-Cannibal Corpse on the listener, as Domestic Extremity is packed full of massive beatdowns.
One surprising element to Domestic Extremity is the use of slow and sludgy moments. For all Crouch’s hooky, infections riffing and hardcore vocal, it exits with a howling guitar played over slow, deliberate sludge-inspired drumming. Similarly, as with No Hope, Flesh Fed features a not-unnoticed sludgy guitar part.
Luke Smith’s drumming is solid underpinning all of what Scalp achieve on the record and Devan Fuentes plucks a variety of moods from his six strings, but it is Cole Sattler’s bass-work that creates a core to Scalp’s sound which anchors it and prevents it from exploding into a million pieces.
For the most part the ten tracks of Domestic Extremity clock in at less than two and a half minutes each, with only the aforementioned Crouch and the final song, Depleted Mass breaking the three-minute mark. Beginning with a slow bass rumble beneath a sustained guitar, the track unfolds itself through metronomic drumming, chopping, rapid fire riffing, sludgy moments and even something akin to a 70s Italian horror movie.
The polyphonic nature of Depleted Mass has it closing out with a reprise of the hardcore sound and come the end of the album the compulsion to press Play again is overwhelming.
When all of this is over, and the world goes back to normal, these lads really do need to get on up on as many stages as possible and let vocalist Cole Rodgers rage against… well, what have you got?
That feels like the best way to experience Scalp. Until then, Domestic Extremity is as good a substitute as you’re going to get.
