THE CRYPTICUS + SCAREMAKER SPLIT IS A BIG BLOODY WIN FOR ALL INVOLVED
I’m not much of a splits guy. Usually it’s a too much of this, too much of that, and I end up forgetting about them entirely. But here we have a perfect split from a marriage of like minds that have no doubt watched David Warner get his head sliced off by plate glass in The Omen and thought, “God, I wanna do that one day!”, but settled on metal as a distant second career instead.
Along with lyrical Adams Family values, both Crypticus and Scaremaker sound like the sort of mid-tempo-inclined musos who wish everything in the studio were analog and barely working, who’d gladly bury their guitars in actual dirt to if there were half a chance the earthy marinade would render the ultimate sound more aggressively repugnant.
I find that Scaremaker resonates with me more deeply, mostly because the combination male/female growly vocalizing adds an undeniable layer of oddly invigorating creepiness — although Crypticus’ damaged throat utterances are sassy by their own right.
What’s great about Scaremaker is no big deal but it’s big enough to make them irresistible. I love the way Elektrokutioner’s drums flail with such precision. He’s the Keith Moon of extreme metal, giving us the delirious sense that this shit is totally going to fall apart at every second and then… not.
And I way-dug the Sabbath-ian riffs you could hum after the first hearing. I thought they sounded like Wooden Stak,e and then I found out that their co-author was Scaremaker bassist Vanessa Nocera, a Stake co-member, and I said to self, “Good ears, self. If only this skill made you, like, money.”
But I digress. There’s a bit of Stake in this death, which makes it unexpectedly inventive. “Insane Die-section?” It’s a waltz (!) until it slips into 4/4, and then it just gets weird — not math metal weird, but like your head’s been side-swiped and this is how shit sounds with a traumatized skull. Fucking bloody dizzy weird good. And f it didn’t already sound like it just shot itself up with some China white, “Reverberate Through the Dark Woods” could be the cut-time part of a black metal song. But Scaremaker clearly prefer slow zombies, so no jittery tremolo picking, but plenty of hummable lymph fluid riffery, and Elektrokutioner’s amazing shake and break drumming.
As for Crypticus, they have only one singer, Patrick Bruss — but j’adore his style, where it sounds like all the bones of the facial region have long ago collapsed and all noise issues from the back of a throat long-shredded from a need to scream. Why did he need to scream? Because he’s in a Colorado death metal band like Crypticus, fool.
If we’re going to use Grey’s Anatomy for descriptive metaphors, I’d say Scaremaker‘s riffs are all about glubby inner organs with Crypticus’ spidery fretworks are nervous wrecks — concisely angular shots of adrenaline that quickly get the message (“to the pit with thou!) to the brain with minimum muss and fuss.
Changing metaphors, you could say that this is metal as lumbar puncture needle, a quick in and a quick out. Or you could add that where Scaremaker songs are like tuneful ground sloths that take four to seven minutes to do their damage, Crypticus are fucking death ninjas of transistorized terror, and then buh-bye at the three-or-so minute mark.
Whatever — if you include the last Wooden Stake release with what’s going on here, Razorback Records is on the verge of becoming as much an artistic quantity as the bands that comprise it, a gore metal version of 4 AD or Southern Lord, but with less airs and hoo-haw. In short: a big bloody win for all involved.
(four out of five horns)
-IG
