Gospels for the Sick

To date, Scum's Gospels for the Sick might be the most appropriate album to serve as an admonition against blind-buying used stuff I find used in record stores. I mean, granted, it certainly looked promising as far as first impressions go - it was listed in the metal section, the cover shows a guy wearing an Aura Noir shirt; not a bad start considering I was fairly sure it wasn't nu-metal at that point - but I bought it (while it was priced at $4... not a great sign) and took it home and listened to it and INSTANTLY UNDERSTOOD WHY ITS PREVIOUS OWNER HAD FORSAKEN IT BECAUSE HOLY JESUS IT IS BAD. I've heard of supergroups being overrated before, for sure, but this may be the first time I've heard one that was outright godfuckingawful in nearly every conceivable way. This is embarrassingly horrible shit - if I didn't think I could gain a buck off of selling the CD back to another store, I'd flick it into the air and use it for skeet shooting practice without a second thought.

Allegedly, the artistic intent of this (thankfully short-lived) supergroup was to create "black metal with a real punk rock attitude". Do these chucklefucks know what black metal sounds like!?!? I mean, certainly they do, this project features members of bands like Aborym and Emperor, but I'm willing to bet that whoever made that claim was one of the two members that have never been involved with a black metal band in their entire lives. If you are an average human being that is not a product of incest and you've never played footsie with a wood chipper before, you have about as many toes as Gospels of the Sick has black metal riffs. And they're rather wimpy black metal riffs, at that - pretty good at times, but structurally simplistic and never becoming more than predictable "dreadful"-sounding riffs. No intricate harmonies, no interesting chord structures, nothing you couldn't pick up by reading the Wikipedia article on the genre. Calling it a form of black metal that's merely "dumbed-down" - or any other insult that implies a level of intelligence above complete pants-shitting incompetence - would be an outright fucking compliment.

But no, if the entire album was just a bunch of decent if unremarkable black metal riffs written by somebody who had apparently never heard the genre before, I'd be totally fine, if unimpressed and still rather disappointed that I paid money for this. My issues lie in just about everything else - and for a project with such a clear-cut goal (black metal + punk - really, how do you fuck it up?) there is quite a bit of "everything else". A lot of what I can only presume is the band members' interpretation of "punk" sounds like either lame thrash metal or shitty Obituary groove/death at a high tempo - basically lots of retarded, bouncy riffs led around by half-steps up and down the fretboard, backed up with either lame rocking beats or ineffectual hardcore-styled upbeat-snare rhythms. The actual punk rock influences fall totally flat as well - there's maybe two moments on Gospels for the Sick where the average episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic doesn't have it flat-out beat for conjuring a "real punk rock attitude". The punk that's here is totally limp, generic and moronic - expect it to sound like it's being made by people who don't really know what punk sounds like. (Come to think of it, what the fuck do the members of this project know how to play? Polka?) It's not especially catchy, the guitar patterns are uninteresting, and really there's almost nothing here short of total artistic jejunity. Ugh, and don't even get me started on the vocals, which are these snotty, intentionally-muddy snarls that sound like some fucking old fart trying WAY too hard to sound "unhinged" and "off the chain maaan". They're TERRIBLE. There's no variety of texture, just the same "I think I'm way cooler than I really am" tone delivered with varying levels of snootiness. Unsurprisingly, he's also the member who wrote all the lyrics, featuring sUpER-eDgY phrases such as "THE ANTI-BRIGRADE" and "CONSUME TO BUY / CONSUME TO LIE", and various other platitudes that get used by morons as a cheap replacement for finding actually intelligent things to say.

I fucking HATE this. There's like two good riffs on the entire album (the riff at around 1:22 on "Truth Won't Be Sold" is admittedly heavy as fuck and pretty sweet, even if it's pretty firmly rooted in death metal and not black metal or punk) and the rest is clogged full of songs that all last two or three minutes too long (yeah, the songs here are totally full of enough substance to justify being five minutes long - keep telling yourself that, guys) because they're too busy covering the shitty Obituary era that nobody likes to play what they actually set out to make, which they somehow suck at even more - and then all of THAT is topped off by one of the worst vocal performances I've ever heard in my life. Maybe the northwest US scene of bands like Bone Awl and Furdidurke has spoiled me in regards to BM/punk hybrids, but to hear those bands and then this piece of garbage is almost embarrassing for the latter - the fact that mankind once had a goal and ended up THIS far from it must be some sort of testament to the eternal errancy of the human mind. I sincerely hope the members involved in this beg Jesus for forgiveness every single night of the rest of their lives for having ever been involved in creating this. FUCK.