EP Review: Scorpion Milk – Flesh Masks For Skulls
Reviewed by Rick Eaglestone
Mat McNerney is a perpetual-motion machine, a restless shape-shifter who has spent an entire career refusing to sit still, from the avant-garde black metal of his Kvohst days through the death-rock swoon of Beastmilk and Grave Pleasures to the woodland psychedelia of Hexvessel and now, barely a year on from Scorpion Milk’s debut Slime Of The Times, he is already back with a six-track EP called Flesh Masks For Skulls and is exactly the kind of gleeful, between-albums curio that only a genuine lifer would ever bother to make.
Scorpion Milk is McNerney’s post-punk vehicle, and Flesh Masks For Skulls is less a grand statement than a scrapbook: three new originals, a pair of carefully chosen covers, and a remix, all bound together by that unmistakable apocalyptic-goth sensibility he has been refining for two decades now. On paper it is the sort of stopgap that could so easily feel like label-mandated filler between proper records. In practice it is nothing of the kind. This is a man plainly having the time of his life, and that joy turns out to be infectious enough to paper over any inherent bittiness the format invites.
Dreaming Skulls kicks things off and immediately reassures you that the well has not run dry. It is all taut, angular bass and that trademark McNerney croon it is one part Andrew Eldritch, one part carnival barker at the end of the world, riding a rhythm that struts rather than stomps. There is darkness here, of course, but it is a darkness you can dance to; the sound of a discotheque going up in flames while everyone stubbornly keeps moving. A confident, hooky opener that could sit comfortably on any Grave Pleasures record without anyone batting an eyelid.
Crushed Under the Weight slows the pulse and leans hard into the goth melodrama, all cavernous reverb and doom-laden atmosphere. It is the most metal-adjacent thing on offer, the guitars taking on a genuine heft while McNerney intones his way through what plays like a meditation on modern dread, it is a mood piece, and the mood it conjures: claustrophobic, resigned and oddly beautiful is precisely the point of the exercise.
Guilty By Default is the pick of the originals, for my money, a sharper and punkier cut that snaps with real urgency. There is a paranoid, wired energy running through it, the sound of a man watching the news through his fingers, and the chorus sinks its hooks in on the very first pass, with the efficiency of the very best post-punk. If Scorpion Milk’s next full-length is built from bones like these, then we are in for something special indeed.
Then comes the wild card. All Snakes, No Ladders is lifted from Slime Of The Times and handed over to Norway’s Ulver for a comprehensive reimagining, and it is the EP’s most genuinely radical moment. Ulver dismantle the original and rebuild it as something colder, stranger and far more electronic, the kind of transformation that sends you scurrying back to the source track to hear it anew.
The two covers are where the EP quietly shows its working, laying bare the DNA that runs through everything McNerney touches. What We All Want, the Gang of Four staple – jagged, funk-inflected agit-punk is written all over Scorpion Milk’s own sound, and the version here honours the original’s coiled tension while dragging it somewhere darker and more sepulchral. Gut Feeling then takes Devo’s herky-jerky art-punk and reframes it through the Scorpion Milk lens, trading the nervy paranoia of the original for something more brooding and grand. It really should not work as well as it does. Both function as a kind of family tree, a nod to the pioneers, and both are delivered with enough personality to earn their place rather than lapsing into karaoke.
So, what, in the end, is Flesh Masks For Skulls? It is not the essential Scorpion Milk release that honour still belongs to Slime Of The Times, and this was never trying to compete on those terms. It is a between-courses palate cleanser, a victory lap, a chance for McNerney to indulge his magpie instincts and share a few of the toys he has been playing with. Judged on those modest terms, it is a genuine delight: three strong originals, a genuinely daring remix, and two covers that double as a mission statement. There is a lesson buried in here somewhere, too, that a release does not have to be Important with a capital I to be worth your time, and that a curio made purely for the love of it can outshine a hundred grimly focused “proper” albums. At six tracks it never outstays its welcome, and it leaves you hungry for whatever the next full-length has in store. For a man who never stops moving, standing still for twenty minutes has rarely sounded this good.
A magpie’s scrapbook of a stopgap: inessential, unhurried and an absolute joy from a man who simply refuses to stand still.
For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.
