SCORN

mjeanes

Evanescence is probably the easiest of all the Scorn albums to initially get into. Right from the start the unusual rhythms of this album drive right into your brain and make you like it. Many of the songs feature some very cool tribal drums that are quite integral to them. "Light Trap", "Night Tide", and "Exodus" are among Scorn's very best material ever! There's even a Digeridoo player on this album (the Digeridoo is an aborigine wind instrument). Oddly enough, this album has the only Scorn song that I don't like, called "Days Passed". Aside from that though, this is probably the album that I would recommend to someone that has never heard the band because it's instantly likeable.

mjeanes

This album, launched upon the world with the legend 'Redefining Ambient Dub' stickered to the CD case, met with a surge of enthusiastic praise including 'Album Of The Week' in either NME or MM and all manner of accolades. Much as I'd love to cut against the grain, the handful of years since it's release have failed to tarnish it's veneer. For those of you with lives so empty as to not already own this album, I'll attempt to convince you that your record collection has a gaping, Evanescence-shaped hole in it which demands an Evanescence-shaped filler. This album's strength lies not in it's tonal variety - repetition is very much to the forefront - but rather in the sheer relentless drive of the music. That they chose to keep it's BPMs pretty much uniform adds to it's solid, unrelenting status. When you consider that this is a dance album born out of the ashes of Thrash-Meisters NAPALM DEATH and sonic torturers GODFLESH, you'd hardly expect gutless electro-noodling. And you're in no way disappointed. From the doomy chemical spill intro of the albums premier track "Silver Rain Fell" to the screaming silence when the final track finishes, this outer-limits groove grips you and just wont let go. The tracks are long and integral variety kept to a minimum. But it's Train-Driver-Dead-At-The-Wheel impetus is what hammers it's strength home, and what could have overstayed it's welcome departs at just the right moment. Often monochrome - more often colour-drenched, this avoids clichéd electronic pyrotechnics and concentrates on relentless drumming, BULLEN's PIL-simplistic-but-effective bass, a cornucopia of stolen and contaminated samples, and PLOTKIN's other-world Industrial guitar layers. Redefining Ambient Dub? Don't be fooled - this is a cultural cul-de-sac with no in or out - I cannot imagine where it came from and with BULLEN's departure, never led where it promised to go. For this album the line up was MICK HARRIS & NICK BULLEN with JIM PLOTKIN on guitar, NICK GARNETT on didgeridoo and JON WAKELIN credited with 'additional programming'.

Antony Burnham (courtesy of the Metamorphic Journeyman website)

There are those (and they are many) who consider this Scorn's peak moment, the ultimate coalescing of everything they were trying to accomplish. I disagree. However, that doesn't mean it isn't a damn fine album. Singularly fatalistic in vision and totally revolutionary in it's sonic architecture, Evanescence is an album that demands you sit up and take note. The pounding drums, the lurching electronics, the twisted guitar (yes, that is a guitar, believe it or not. J. Plotkin's up to his old "fuck the guitar up so bad no one will know it's a guitar" tricks again), and the relentless dub bassline... and somehow it all works. I'm not sure how, and I really don't think very many others could have pulled of that neat trick of sliding a dub reggae bassline (and a didgeridoo on one track... you know, that African instrument that goes boingdigidoingdigigidigigoing for extended periods of time) under what is essentially grindcore with dark ambient leanings, but Scorn did it, and things were never quite the same after ward. The only thing that hampers it and makes me slightly prefer Ellipsis (the remixes of Evanescence by Coil, Meat Beat Manifesto, Autechre, Laswell, and other) is the production... something about is just not quite right. The bass is fine, the drums are fine, but something about the way the rest of it sounds just kind of irks me, and whatever it is got cleaned up on Ellipsis and all the following Scorn albums. But that's just a personal problem, you might not even care.

8/10

A.P. (courtesy of the WPRB website)