Cleopatra 2021
Scaropy
Circling back to industrial conveyor, American post-punk veterans close creative space to stress their sonic might.
It’s been a steady 45-year-long run for this band, with peaks and plateaus, so there’s no stopping to them – and no comparison between neighboring records, despite certain consistency. Pushing away the hellish sheen of "Techromancy" that was brilliant in many aspects, the noisy collective explore murkier cosmic reaches now, occasionally rich on detail but somewhat lacking an edge. A conscious choice, obviously.
Resorting to portmanteau once again to outline how scarily creepy entropy is, the ensemble may bring down a tectonic riff down on the listener on the album’s title track – only its multilayered, solemn, deceptively muddy heaviness is infused with nuance and operatic uplift and open to optimism that will overtly rise to the surface in “New Happy Fortune” whose pseudo new-age ethereality will be compromised with a bulging, bell-like trance-and-dance-inducing groove. In such an atmosphere, “H Of Spades” can safely pass Lemmy-patented ferocity on to a space-rock group whence he came but, as guitarist Helios Creed and the back-in-the-fold bassist Hilary Stench splice their lysergic licks to the synthesizers-ravaged canvas, the piece’s inherent fury must evaporate to give “Terminate” a riveting gloom on the surface of which high-pitched rustle brightly glistens.
It’s there that “Night Nurse” displays nocturnal pleasures, buried under a thick sonic blanket yet vocals are no more than another instrument here, though not in “An Open Letter” where voices fill the throbbing continuum before six strings start to rage ‘n’ rave, and save “They’re Coming To Get You” from techno theatricality and hilarious spoken word. However, the vacuous “Kilauea” is the best example of this record’s scarceness on the ideas front… Maybe, this is what “Scaropy” should stand for?
***4/5
