SHORT BUT SWEET: SCOUR — “SCOUR”

 

(DGR reviews the debut EP by Scour.)

There is no doubt that the reason the Scour EP and its mid-July release landed on most metal fans’ radar due to the presence of one Phil Anselmo trying his hand at extreme metal. Phil has proven himself to be a polarizing figure this year via one very particular scandal, and it is still not clear whether he thought he was being funny making a racist joke or if he is a fucking gigantic moron.

He seemed penitent enough when the inevitable backlash occurred, pretty much making it clear that if he was proving to be an obstacle to any of the bands he was in, he was willing to leave. But it makes you wonder if these events had any sort of effect on the lead-up to the Scour EP’s mid-July release.

 

I’m still not sure where I stand on the situation because I feel like every ‘hot take’ humanly possible has already been dished out in regards to the man and will likely continue to be for as long as he walks the Earth. It certainly didn’t make for a good look. What interests me is that at any other time the lead-off sentence to this review is what would’ve sold this EP.

It’s Phil Anselmo, plus a handful of musicians who have been playing extreme metal for years now. You have a lineup that includes people who have spent time in bands like Pig Destroyer, Conflux, Continuum, Cattle Decapitation, and more — not counting the vocalist himself. If Scour was put together for the sole purpose of finding people who could play the speediest, most death-metal, grind-heavy stuff possible, then the right crew was found, like handpicking an all-star team of death metal musicians.

In fact, Scour is one of those groups that, outside of the fact that you have the former Pantera vocalist fronting the project, would’ve been one to keep an eye on anyway. Instead, we have the interesting (on a cultural front) addition of Phil Anselmo to the lineup, attempting to prove that he can shriek it out with the best of them. So Phil, welcome to the extreme metal world, and allow me to register my bewilderment that there haven’t been a thousand metal bands named Scour by now.

One of the initial criticisms I saw levied at the Scour EP was that it was going to feel inauthentic: Phil was basically making a play at legitmacy by surrounding himself with some super-talented musicians and playing off of extreme metal’s reputation as one of the last bastions of being ‘dangerous’. The opening segments of “Dispatched” should probably wipe all of that off the map, as the band themselves basically start the EP in a full-blown battle of Armageddon and basically spend the rest of the thirteen-plus minutes of this EP going through different stages of the end times musically. In fact you could probably compare this EP to just listening to the sound of an endless artillary barrage, given the terrifying drum performance that takes place on this disc.

Scour is a lean six tracks, with one instrumental at track five, and with a short run time Scour paint themselves as being fairly unnaproachable — the vocal shrieks and howls alone, on top of the constant blast and bombing run present, at the very least put this EP pretty high up on any sort of metric scale of heaviness.

In fact, not to knock Phil’s impressively earnest attempt at hanging with the music behind him, but Scour would’ve been razor-wire sharp and bleedingly heavy with any person on the vocal front; so in some aspects, the band itself was already molten metal enough to melt through the Earth’s crust.

Phil himself keeps things fairly perfunctory — many of the songs are delivered in one- to three-sentence yelps and most of them top out with enough word variation that they could fit inside a text message. But the man is growling and screaming, and were you not told who was behind the mic, it would’ve taken some serious time to try and place just who that anguished howl belongs to. That right there was a pretty eyebrow-raising realization to have, so you can’t say anyone was mailing it in on that front.

If there is one place you could seriously fault Scour, it is that the EP feels like it came from one solid burst of songwriting — which is a strange criticism when spelled out, but hearing it, the EP feels like an exercise in permutations on the same general formula. Like a choose-your-own-adventure of extreme metal, you’ll recognize some parts from the start and others seem to return like musical motifs, making songs start to blur together.

You can recognize a lot of the tiles used, but in each song on the EP Scour attempts to reorganize them in a different way — all at neck-breaking velocity and super-high tempo. There’s no breathing room, but in that lack of breathing room also comes acceptance that this situation is what will be the norm. In a way, extremity comes very close to becoming mundane, and Scour at the very least cut it off right about the time where it seems like that is about to happen, just before you start to find comfort in the suffocating restraints and almost non-stop rattle-can blastbeats.

One of the benefits of keeping your songs at two minutes, and maybe a tad more if you’re feeling ambitious, is that you’re snappy enough that thoughts like this only start to intrude long after the opening strains of the last song. It was only on repeated spins that I really noticed the songs all having a similar sort of ‘tonality’.

With all the verbiage being heaped upon Scour, the long and short of it always comes down to the same damned question: Is it worth listening to? I’d say yes. I don’t mean for the previous paragraph to sound overwhelmingly negative — it’s not. I enjoyed my time with Scour and that’s one of the reasons right there: It’s really not asking for a whole lot of time. The Scour EP skirts about thirteen and a half minutes, and as something that might’ve landed on your radar as a musical curiosity, it is worth the trip. It honestly proved to be a pleasant surprise for someone who was initially skeptical on the whole project and was ready to give it a once-and-done. It’s not world-shattering, but it is a super-fast blast of hellfire.

In addition, the first few songs are shockingly intense. The disc basically starts at apocalyptic and stays there, so the opening songs might actually blow your hair back some. Finally, overall, Scour does work as a debut showpiece, it pretty much states exactly what the band will be about from moment one, and a chance to expand upon it could result in some excellent material. They’ve taken a handful of songs (that, granted, as pointed out above, are about the same general formula) and made them hyper fast blasters, and at the very least, the ride is fun.

Remember that Scour have some amazing musicians in their lineup, and instrumentally could whip out some fiery stuff in the future. The EP is enough of an appetizer to make me want to at least see where this bus is going.

 

Scour was released July 15 by Housecore Records.

http://www.facebook.com/scourband
http://www.thehousecorerecords.com
http://www.facebook.com/housecorerecords