AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SCORCHED — “ECHOES OF DISMEMBERMENT”

 

We’ve been watching the rapid ascent of Delaware’s Scorched with increasing excitement ever since we premiered a full stream of their self-titled demo in May 2015, which was then about to be released by Unspeakable Axe. And just this past July our Norwegian friend Gorger praised their split with Putrisect (Final State of Existence) in his own distinctive voice. We also made mention of the excellent four-way split they joined along with Gatecreeper, Homewrecker, and Outer Heaven.

But now the band have reached new heights with their first full-length album, Echoes of Dismemberment, which it’s our pleasure to premiere for you in advance of its November 25 release by Unspeakable Axe.

When I heard the first publicly released song from the album (“Rot In Confinement”) after it premiered at DECIBEL, I ventured the opinion that Scorched were “about to blow up”. Now having heard the full album, I still feel that way — in spades.

 

 

You’ll get a vivid sense of the band’s subject matter, and of the blood-soaked morbidity of their music, from the song titles alone. To borrow one of them, what you have here are dealings of a gruesome kind. To borrow from the other titles, flesh awaits our ghoulish attention, rotting in confinement with a vile lingering stench, and Scorched take us to the chamber where the torture will be prolonged, the walls echoing with dismemberment, the autopsy left incomplete, with the growing excitement that comes from craving human remnants… and in the end, we’ll all be scorched.

Allegedly inspired by such films as the widely banned and graphically brutal Cannibal Holocaust and the ridiculously vile I Spit On Your Grave, Scorched have made their own gore-soaked audio horror. No, they are not the first death metal band to embrace this kind of nightmarish death metal degeneracy — they join a long and venerable legacy within the genre, anchored by such heavyweights as Grave and Autopsy— but they’ve done it with precocious mastery.

 

Scorched construct their scenes of slaughter by deploying massive, distorted, bone-grinding riffs and deranged, whammy-tortured solos, along with bone-cracking drumwork, grisly tremolo leads, and demented, flickering fretboard frenzies, augmented by utterly gruesome gurgles, growls, roars, and skin-splitting howls. And they enhance the supernatural cast of the album by segmenting the songs with interludes and song intros made of menacing keyboard instrumentals and wordless choral voices.

The songs are also tremendously dynamic, moving fluidly among immense lumbering stomps, monstrous loping canters, pile-driving hammer blows, bursts of grinding, thrashing mayhem, gruesome lurching staggers, pavement-splitting chugs, and full-on rumbling tank attacks. You’re never left in one pace or rhythm for very long, and that’s part of what makes the album so galvanizing.

The songs are also hellishly infectious. In fact, the odds are high that “Rot In Confinement” will wind up on our year-end list of the year’s most infectious songs.

 

So, prepare to eat your fill of decaying flesh… and smile broadly while you do it. To pre-order the album, go HERE.

Scorched on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/scorchedde

Unspeakable Axe:
http://unspeakableaxerecords.com
http://www.facebook.com/unspeakableaxerecords