Album Review: Scordatura – Led Into Oblivion
Some years back I had the opportunity to see Scordatura live, but because my life is a sequence of solvent-inhaling episodes of abject dickheadery, I gave them a miss. Yet every mistake renders you indebted; sooner or later the future will demand payment. Now seems the time to make good on this particular error; faced with their new album, an episode from my past reaches forth through the drifting haze of time to slap my chops and kick my balls – I should have leapt on this band like a starved jaguar an age ago.
From Scotland they hail, and what Scordatura do is so far up my street that they’ve parked on my lawn, fucked my wife, and my kids are calling them “dad” now. Sounding somewhere in the middle of a list of bands we all probably know and love (Aborted, Cryptopsy, Foetal Juice, so on and so forth) theirs is a breed of grindy death dealing that feels calculated down to a quantum level to tick most every box I have to be ticked. Thumbing grimy protrusions into the puckered orifices of tech (“Oppressed Repressed”) while still swinging with enough dirty groove to make you feel as though you’re being trepanned with a haggis (“A Manic Indoctrination”), it’s a deeply complex Rubik’s cube of seemingly infinite riffs screwed together into these pulsating, unruly compositions – not wholly unlike cattle decapitation in places, what with all the sliding grind riffs on tracks like “Led Into Oblivion” – and god help me if it isn’t crushing over each and every spin.
Tracks spiral out into convulsing centipede nests of sections, zipping through scalpel-sharp tremolo sequences and noodle-digit flights of techy fret molestation only to spring through all of it with a brutal straight right of a Regurgitate goregrind riff that turns your solar plexus into paste. “Begging for Death” (the album closer) does this so well, wormhole-jumping between rhythms and beats at a pace that feels hopelessly chaotic yet leashed, controlled and deployed with military precision. I knew not that Buckfast and deep fried Mars bars could grant such powers, but, well, here we are. At 28 minutes there’s an argument that the album is a little on the stingy side regarding it’s runtime, but equally when it’s such a voracious collection of musical hate crimes it’s one I could only make half heartedly. Rabid wolverines don’t need a generous timeframe to flense your skull, and realistically neither do Scordatura – and while I’d love it if they put guitar solos on their followup (whenever that happens to surface) an absence of solos isn’t a dealbreaker so much as a footnote on an otherwise dwarven wishlist.
Not so long back I reviewed “Sphere of Atrocities” by Portuguese degenerates Grog, and there’s a few sentiments expressed there that I feel I could repeat here. Speed. Technicality. A raw, unfiltered lust for atrocious violence. These things speak to me on therapist-worrying levels. It’s why I have to be chained to a radiator if I want to listen to Colombian death metal, something about the unbridled semi-controlled chaos of it drills down to the molten core of everything I like in my death metal and lays eggs there. Now, Scordatura aren’t quite that intense, but they’re nonetheless speaking my fucking language with absolute fluency. When blastbeat-happy fare like…well, all of it, but lets take “When the Red Moon Hangs Low” cycles through it’s litany of tempo switch ups, each time choosing the perfect possible moment to twist a groove into your ribs or extend a riff by a measure or so just to keep you guessing, the grin on my face is so wide I have to walk sideways to get through the door. It helps that the production is a little on the raw side too; bright, clinical, mirror-sheen production values have their place, but that place is nowhere near my ears. Music like this needs a grit to it, the crunch of molars on cartilage, asphalt ground into shredded musculature. Scordatura, praise be, agree – and went for a legible but still appreciably grisly job that takes their unsavoury secretions and rams wet chunks of it down your gullet.
I’ve nitpicks. There’s a stock “fire” sound effect in the intro that felt a bit tawdry but if that’s going to be the calibre of criticism I can manage then I may as well not bother. If you like any of the bands I’ve somewhat liberally namechecked here, then if the next thing you do isn’t buying this then you are bad at life and I hope that every pigeon you ever walk under shits on you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play this thing again for roughly the 4000th time.
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