By Design

I found Scumpulse on Bandcamp. I was searching through the "crust punk" tag, and the name "Scumpulse" caught my eye. It struck me as particularly metal, which really ought to have been a sign because Scumpulse is a metal band. And in fact, it's rather confusing that they tag themselves as crust, because in all actuality they're some of the best black metal in recent memory.

Now, in the interest of fairness there is some notable influence from hardcore and punk, and the 'crust punk' label isn't completely unwarranted. But from the first few chords of EP opener "La Mer", it's clear that the band listens to a lot more Dissection than Disfear. Icy lead guitars buzzsaw over blast beats and chord progressions that stay eternally minor. Lyrics include "I fill up your lungs / Infect you like pleurisy" (and that's on the positive side). The mood conjured by the music really can't be compared to anything besides '90s black metal, and it's a pleasure to hear that in the mid-2010s.

The punk influence, though sparse, is welcome too. Most of it is found in the lyrics - the cleverly titled "Home Is Where You Hang Yourself" features lyrics that seem cherry-picked from UK crust and California hardcore. But even the punk rock lyricism is filtered through extreme metal - "Griefer" features the punk one-two "I'm happy as a cancer on society", but follows it up with "I will eat you with my blackness". I've never heard Caustic Christ sing a line like that.

When the hardcore influence shows up musically, it's more than appropriate. Their songs take cues from the best hardcore by getting right to the point. One of the worst features about black metal is the tendency of inexperienced bands to equate quantity with quality. Sure, Burzum and Darkthrone have written their fair share of 10-minute epics, but they had a vision. Scumpulse doesn't insult the listener's intelligence by hammering out the same riff over and over. Four and a half minutes might not sound short and snappy, but compared to many bands in the scene it's just about the snap of your fingers.

The only real problem that the EP has is exclusive to the re-release. By Design's original tracklist features five spectacular songs. Its re-release, however, features three cover tunes. The first is an incredibly ill-conceived Oi Polloi remake. Though bands like All Pigs Must Die prove that punk and metal can mix to great effect, the extreme difference in Scumpulse's black metal sound and the traditional punk rock of Oi Polloi is extreme enough that Scumpulse sounds positively silly playing such simple riffs. Sadly, the only cover that should have worked - the Immortal classic "Call of the Wintermoon - suffers from the opposite problem. The band actually sounds too comfortable playing Immortal riffs, and the cover does a great job of showing just how much of Scumpulse's sound is indebted to Abbath and Demonaz.

At the end of the day, though, you really can't judge a band too harshly when the worst part of the record is the songs they didn't write. And Scumpulse delivers a spectacular debut full of kvlt riffing, scathing lyrics and powerful lead guitars that put many black metal legends to shame. I'd firmly recommend this EP to anyone with ears, and if this is an indication of things to come, their debut album will surely be a classic.

This review was assigned to me during the 2015 Metal Archives Secret Satan Review Challenge. The release was chosen for me by veteran reviewer oneyoudontknow.

The more I listen to and ponder over bands who have attempted to marry the disparate but equally abrasive sounds of crust punk and black metal, the more I have realized how much it makes sense for such an amalgamation to have come about, especially when it's done by people who have their musical origins in the punk scene rather than the metal scene.

I don't mean to imply that metal is clearly some sort of superior genre and thus that this "evolution" makes sense from some argument about progression toward higher art or somesuch. Crust is and always has been about hatred, hatred for humanity and what it has done to itself and to the planet. It's the disaffected outcries of hardcore amped up to bloodboiling levels of antihumanism. That kind of rage can only be sustained for so long, I think, before eventually the musicians involved turn elsewhere in their need to express themselves. If an artist spends his days and nights writing and performing furious anthems decrying man's follies, it makes a lot of sense to me that eventually he will seek some sort of escape from this hopeless reality. Metal has always had a romantic, escapist bent to it, but black metal has, for a long time now, carried these undercurrents of depression and loss along with its own distinct brand of misanthropy and nihilism (among other, often more constructive rather than destructive themes, such as mysticism, paganism and Satanism). Giving up on the world has to take its toll on a person who is so angry all the time.

In the case of a band like Young and In the Way, we see how the bleakness of the crust elements can be so effectively melded with the hopelessness of the more depressive sort of black metal. Scumpulse, as you might imagine based on their moniker, are of a slightly more aggressive bent than their contemporaries in YAITW, favoring a more savage blending of the two styles, though they themselves also seem to have embraced self-destruction, as evidenced by song titles like "Home Is Where You Hang Yourself" and the misery-drenched chords of "Griefer."

If one studies the lineup of Scumpulse, the band's approach to songwriting starts to make a lot of sense. The bassist and rhythm guitarist both are former members of Aberdeen black/crust outfit Fifteen Dead, and as you might expect bring pulsing crust rhythms to the riffs as well as a vocal style that's one part Skitsystem and another part Emperor. The drummer and lead guitarist both have backgrounds in metal bands, which shows itself in the rolling double bass grooves and blasts that sit comfortably alongside d-beats and thrash grooves. The lead guitar is vital here, injecting both some technicality into the riffing as well as keeping one foot of the songwriting planted in metaldom at all times by countering every primitive crust riff with a searing tremolo melody or blazing solo. There's a lot of talent pouring across those frets, with some borderline shreddy lead bits doing a whole hell of a lot to pour on that escapism that's so central to metal's sound.

After five original tracks (all of which are longer than you would probably expect out of a crust outfit, averaging about five minutes apiece) we get three covers on this reissued version of the EP. First is a mean as a kick to the nuts rendition of Oi Polloi's "John Major - Fuck You" (though the target of the tune has been here replaced with George Osbourne, famous for promoting austerity measures while bolstering Britain's defense spending) that gives some insight into the band's punk roots. Next up is a Fifteen Dead song that shows something of Scumpulse's own musical origins, a band which was without a doubt more based in nihilistic crust than Scumpulse's more blackened sound. Finally, we see a taste of where that more frostbitten, tremolo and melody laden tendency has come from with an incendiary take on Immortal's "Call of the Wintermoon."

While I really do like how effectively Scumpulse have managed to blend crust and black metal, almost always playing something that's clearly identifiable as a combination of both genres, and I'm appreciative of their talents as musicians and potency as performers, I do wish there was a bit more atmosphere here. Each song stands on its own, but I think I've been a bit spoiled by Young and In the Way's tendency toward structuring whole releases with a carefully selected track order, masterful and soul-crushing transitions and a palpable sense of grandiosity engulfed in hopelessness. Scumpulse have the chops and the tunes, so here's hoping that these guys, too, can successfully make the shift toward more whole-album oriented songwriting and perhaps a more careful, nuanced approach rather than going fullbore rage meets woe all the time. Time is on their side, at least.