Scour
Scour
(Housecore Records)
Black metal in its most epic and harrowing form transcends. It carves the shadowy inner soul from your skeletal frame lengthwise. Hovering above the tree lines, frosty, dark, and deep, it moves like a ghost towards a vast warmth. In a thick nestle of shattered and angled wood it sits in your heart, spirited and grim. Good black metal is about devotion. It’s one of the rare artistic forms that can’t quite be faked. Scour, the new somewhat black metal group featuring Phil Anselmo and a full stack of extreme metal superstars (John Jarvis, Derek Engeman, Chase Fraser, and Jesse Schobel), doesn’t quite reach any point of transcendence. I’m hesitant to say their debut album is “faked”, because I don’t think it is. There’s some real energy in it. Overall though, the record is a bit flat, sort of odd, and teeters towards the rushed and unexplored.
One thing about creating art though, is the importance of believing in your ability to live free, and to move beyond pain. Anselmo’s certainly been through a few unfortunate happenings lately, and this new album seems a little like an attempt to cope with some dark frustrations. Reinvent something perhaps. You’d think black metal would be the form to cull from. For Anselmo, it’s not.
The album is certainly extreme, and definitely has its moments. “Codes” gets scary in the middle and the energy starts to really bubble; “Tactics” is a cool dark ambient pause, and “Crooked” has a nice pulsing drive, but all throughout there’s quite a few jammed up sections that could have flowed better with a more natural approach. Though it’s been noted that Scour is something of a modern day black metal band, I would say black metal is nonlinear and at its best, circular and organic. I think the stuff Anselmo was doing with the Illegals was truer, more artistic, and more instinctive that this so-called “modern black metal” recording. Scour levels out often and never really pushes itself towards the eternal sun. That point of ascension—of growth.
Music has a funny way of kicking you in the ass though, and the more I listen to Scour the better it actually sounds. It succeeds as an extreme record to some extents, but certainly not as a black metal album. To be fair though, I don’t think that was the ultimate goal; and there in lies the record’s odd juxtaposition. I thought Philip H. Anselmo & the Illegals were a great project: punishing, avant-garde, widening and strange. Scour is in the same vein, but holds a moniker and an angle that never really lifts off the ground. Perhaps in time the band will move beyond and transcend. Until then.
